Is Acedly a Cluely alternative?

Acedly is positioned as the interview-prep alternative to general-purpose meeting overlays like Cluely. It trades horizontal breadth (no sales-call or exam mode) for an end-to-end interview-prep workflow: Resume Builder + ATS analysis, Mock Interview with role-targeted scenarios, Phone Interview mode, online Assessment Assistant, and the real-time Interview Assistant — all threading one canonical résumé/JD context, with measurably lower end-to-end latency (~98 ms median), per-platform stealth verification across 8 meeting clients, named 30+ language coverage, and pricing below Cluely's headline tier.

Is Cluely safe to use after the 2025 data breach?

Cluely disclosed a breach affecting approximately 83,000 users in mid-2025 and stated it had addressed the underlying issue. The decision is yours; the practical advice is to use a dedicated email for the account and to assume any transcript you don't explicitly delete may live longer than the session. Acedly's stance is that call audio is processed in memory and discarded at end-of-call; transcripts are retained only when the candidate opts in for the debrief.

Which is faster end-to-end during a live interview?

Acedly publishes a measured median of ~98 ms end-to-end on consumer hardware. Cluely does not publish a comparable verified number for the interview use case. The only honest test is to time both yourself — see the 'How to test' section above. Anything under 200 ms is conversationally invisible; anything over 250 ms is a tell.

Can interviewers detect either tool?

Both use OS-level capture exclusion that hides the overlay from `getDisplayMedia` calls — the API every modern meeting client uses for screen share. Acedly publishes a per-platform verification cadence (eight platforms). Cluely claims undetectability on majors but does not publish a comparable log. In practice both work on vanilla Zoom / Meet / Teams; the asymmetry shows on Webex, Lark, Chime, and any unusual setup.

Does either tool work on coding platforms like Coderpad or HackerRank?

Acedly reads the editor and the audio on Coderpad and HackerRank, so the model sees both the problem and the candidate's in-progress code as context. Cluely is a general overlay and works at the audio layer; it does not advertise editor-aware coding integration. For live coding rounds this is the largest single-axis difference between the two.

Is it ethical to use either tool in an interview?

The ethical question is the same for both: whether real-time AI assistance crosses your employer's or interviewer's expectations. Some companies explicitly prohibit it. Acedly's position is that the choice — and the disclosure — sits with the candidate. The product is built so it can be disclosed if you want it disclosed, and so it doesn't leak if you choose not to. Cluely's positioning leans more openly into the gray area; the same legal disclaimers apply.

Comparison14 min read

Acedly AI vs Cluely: Interview Copilot Honest Comparison (2026)

Acedly AI vs Cluely: an honest breakdown of latency, interview focus, stealth verification, language coverage, and pricing — written by the Acedly team to help candidates pick the right real-time AI for live interviews.

Devon Park

Head of Research, Acedly

Published September 4, 2025

TL;DR

Acedly vs Cluely, in one paragraph: both products ship a real-time AI overlay that sits on top of a live call and surfaces answers on a surface the interviewer can't see — but they're built for different jobs. Cluely is the higher-funded brand (a16z-led $15M Series A in June 2025, $20M+ total) with a deliberately broad pitch — "cheat on everything" — that targets meetings, sales calls, and exams alongside interviews. Acedly is an interview-prep platform: the same live copilot is paired with a Resume Builder + ATS analysis, a Mock Interview mode with role-targeted scenarios, a dedicated Phone Interview mode, an Online Assessment helper, and post-call AI review. Acedly also publishes a measurably lower end-to-end latency (~98 ms median), per-platform stealth verification across 8 meeting clients, and 30+ named transcription languages. Pick Acedly if interview prep through the live round is the workflow you want one tool for; pick Cluely if you want one overlay that follows you across meetings, sales calls, and exams without the prep stack.

Acedly vs Cluely: what each product actually is in 2026

Cluely became the most-talked-about real-time AI overlay in 2025 after a viral launch video and a $15M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in June of that year. The pitch — verbatim from the company's home page — is "cheat on everything." That framing is intentional: Cluely is positioned as a horizontal AI overlay that lives on top of any video call, surfacing context and suggested phrasing for meetings, sales calls, exams, customer interviews, and yes — job interviews. The product ships a polished overlay UX, a mobile companion app, and an aggressive content engine.

Acedly is vertical too — but vertical into the full interview-prep workflow, not vertical into "live overlay." The same product ships: a Resume Builder with ATS analysis (PDF upload or LinkedIn import, layout-risk surfacing, JD tailoring, draft management), a Mock Interview mode with role-targeted scenarios (salary negotiation, team-conflict resolution, project-delay communication, constructive feedback, client complaints, promotion pitch), a Phone Interview mode tuned for voice-only screens, an Assessment Assistant with screenshot capture for online tests, the real-time Interview Assistant during live calls across 8 verified meeting platforms, AcedlyAI Assist (a trusted helper joins via session code + password to see the live transcript and send private suggestions), and a post-call AI review that scores per question and surfaces practice items. The horizontal axis (meetings / sales / exams) is where Cluely wins. The vertical axis (everything between résumé upload and post-call debrief) is where Acedly is built.

This is the honest Cluely vs Acedly comparison: where each tool wins, where each one trades off, and the decision rule we use internally.

Latency: where vertical focus shows up

Latency is the metric every real-time copilot markets, and the one most often quoted in a way that hides the real number. Two distinct measurements get conflated:

Model latency — the time between the prompt being sent to the LLM and the first token coming back.
End-to-end latency — the full round trip from the moment the interviewer finishes the question, through audio capture, streaming speech-to-text, end-of-utterance detection, prompt assembly, model inference, and on-screen render.

End-to-end is what the candidate actually feels during a call.

Acedly publishes a measured median end-to-end of roughly 98 ms on consumer hardware, with a sub-200 ms hard ceiling. The number is the product of two design choices that don't exist in a general-purpose overlay: a tuned interview-audio voice activity detector, and a prompt template that's pre-warmed against the candidate's résumé before the call starts.

Cluely markets its overlay as real-time but, as of the time of writing, does not publish a verified end-to-end median for the interview use case. The video demos look responsive; the published number is the design constraint to test against, not the marketing line. The cleanest test takes ten minutes — see "How to test for yourself" below.

Both products use OS-level capture exclusion under the hood — NSWindowSharingNone on macOS, SetWindowDisplayAffinity(WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE) on Windows. Any serious 2026 copilot has implemented these correctly. The differentiation is in verification cadence.

Acedly publishes a status board enumerating eight meeting clients (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Lark/Feishu, Amazon Chime, Coderpad, HackerRank) with re-verification triggered by each platform's release. Cluely's marketing claims undetectability across major meeting platforms; the company does not publish a per-platform verification log.

In practice both probably work on the majors most candidates use. The verification-log gap matters for two cases: candidates running edge platforms (Webex, Lark, Chime), and senior candidates whose interviewers use atypical setups (custom OBS captures, third-party recording tools) that bypass the standard screen-share pipeline.

There is one historical asterisk worth flagging plainly: Cluely disclosed a data breach in mid-2025 affecting roughly 83,000 users. Acedly's stance on call audio is that it is processed in memory by default and discarded at end-of-call; transcripts are retained only when the candidate opts in for the auto-graded debrief.

Platform coverage matrix

Acedly vs Cluely: meeting and coding platform support, 2026

Feature	Acedly	Cluely
Zoom	Verified, published cadence	Supported
Microsoft Teams	Verified, published cadence	Supported
Google Meet	Verified, published cadence	Supported
Webex	Verified	Supported
Lark / Feishu	Verified	Not prominently listed
Amazon Chime	Verified	Not prominently listed
Coderpad live coding	Editor + audio reading	General overlay (no editor read)
HackerRank live coding	Editor + audio reading	General overlay (no editor read)
Phone calls / browser dial-in	Works via system audio	Works via system audio

The takeaway: for vanilla Zoom or Meet, the two are roughly even. For the long-tail platforms (Webex, Lark, Chime) and the coding sandboxes where the AI must read the editor — not just the audio — Acedly's interview focus shows up.

Language coverage

Acedly's transcription pipeline ships 30+ named spoken languages at a stated single accuracy bar — English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hindi, Vietnamese, and more. Each is a tested target, not a fallback. Multilingual interview loops (a Chinese-speaking founder + an English-speaking PM in the same call, for instance) get handled by routing per-utterance.

Cluely's transcription is competent at major Western languages. Coverage past the top tier is less explicit in the public documentation as of the time of writing.

For candidates interviewing in their second language — or for any loop with a cross-language pair somewhere in the chain — Acedly's named-tier coverage is the safer pick.

Pricing

Pricing snapshot (verify the current page for either tool)

Feature	Acedly	Cluely
Free tier	30 credits on signup, no card	Limited free usage
Headline monthly plan	$69 / month (Pro)	Higher than $69 at the time of writing
Lifetime / one-time option	$988 lifetime	Not offered
Refund window	7-day refund guarantee	Per current terms

Pricing on both sides changes; treat the table as the orientation, not the contract. The shape, though, is durable: Acedly prices below the general-purpose meeting copilots, including Cluely, and offers a lifetime option Cluely does not.

How to test both yourself in ten minutes

A useful Cluely vs Acedly test is not a feature checklist; it is timing data on the round you actually care about. Here is the smallest version of the test:

Install both. Each has a free tier sufficient for one session.
Have a friend read five scripted behavioural questions. Use a stopwatch app on a second phone.
Time the gap between the end of the question and the first token of the answer on each tool's overlay. Three trials per tool.
Share your screen during the test, on each platform you'll actually use (Zoom, Meet, Teams). Confirm the overlay is invisible to the friend on the other side.

Anything over 250 ms is conversationally uncomfortable. Anything over 500 ms is detectable as a beat. If both come in under 200 ms, latency is no longer the deciding axis — pricing and platform coverage are.

How to choose between Acedly and Cluely

The decision rule from the Acedly team — biased, but transparent:

Pick Acedly if interviews are the primary use case and you want one product threading résumé, practice, the live round, and post-call review through one canonical context. The latency target, the per-platform verification, the named language coverage, the editor-aware coding integration, and the price below Cluely's tier are all consequences of the interview-prep depth.
Pick Cluely if you want a single AI overlay that covers meetings, sales calls, study sessions, and the occasional interview without the prep stack. Cluely's horizontal breadth is a real advantage when interviews are one workflow among many.

There is no third answer where both win. The category bifurcates between vertical and horizontal, and that's the decision you're making.