Cluely reviews 2025: Is the AI “cheating” app worth the risk?

We’ve all been there. That moment in a job interview when your mind goes completely blank. Or that high-pressure sales call where the client throws you a curveball question you just weren’t ready for. In those moments, wouldn’t it be great to have a little voice in your ear, feeding you the perfect answer?

That’s the promise of Cluely, a controversial AI tool that has been making waves with its bold "cheat on everything" marketing. It’s designed to be a secret weapon, giving you an edge in interviews, exams, and meetings.

But does it deliver, or is it just a recipe for disaster? We decided to dig into the Cluely reviews, test results, and user feedback to find out what’s really going on. In this breakdown, we’ll cover what Cluely does, where it falls short, and the serious ethical questions it brings up. While the need for instant information is real, you’ll quickly see why Cluely’s approach is a risky gamble not worth taking in any professional setting.

What is Cluely AI?

At its core, Cluely AI is a desktop app that acts as your real-time AI sidekick. The idea is simple: it listens to your conversations through your microphone and watches your screen to figure out what’s happening. Then, it pops up suggested answers and talking points in a hidden overlay on your screen.

The tool is openly marketed for situations where you might want a secret advantage. Think technical coding interviews, intense sales negotiations, proctored online exams, and, believe it or not, even first dates. The founder has leaned into this controversial angle, positioning it as a tool for people who aren’t afraid to bend the rules. This edgy marketing has certainly gotten people talking, making it one of the most buzzed-about AI apps out there.

How Cluely works: Key features

Before we get into the performance and ethics, let’s quickly go over what Cluely claims it can do. Its whole system is built around a few key features designed to give you help on the sly.

• Invisible overlay: This is Cluely’s main trick. The interface is designed to be completely invisible to everyone else when you’re screen-sharing on platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. They see your presentation or your code, but you see the AI’s suggestions.

• Context-aware suggestions: Cluely uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read text on your screen and speech-to-text to transcribe what’s being said. All this information gets fed to a large language model (like GPT-4) to generate what it thinks are helpful, real-time responses.

• Custom playbooks: You can upload your own documents, like PDFs of study guides, company handbooks, or sales scripts, to create a personalized knowledge base. This tells the AI to pull answers from your specific material instead of just the open internet.

• Anti-detection claims: The app supposedly uses some low-level graphics tricks to avoid being flagged by automated proctoring software used for online exams. The effectiveness of this is a huge question mark, and it creates a constant cat-and-mouse game between Cluely and the software trying to detect it.

The reality of using Cluely: Performance and limitations

On paper, Cluely sounds like a secret superpower. But based on user testimonials and in-depth tests, the real-world experience is a lot clunkier and far less effective.

The awkward pause: Cluely’s big delay problem

One of the most consistent complaints in Cluely reviews is the lag. A hands-on test by Business Insider found a 5-to-10 second delay between when a question was asked and when Cluely actually showed a suggestion.

In a natural conversation, that’s an eternity. Imagine an interviewer asks you, "Tell me about a time you handled a difficult project." You just sit there, staring blankly for eight seconds. That silence doesn’t make you look competent; it makes you look lost and unprepared. It completely undermines the entire point of the tool.

When the AI just makes stuff up

We’ve all heard about AI "hallucinations," and Cluely is no exception. In that same Business Insider mock interview, the app straight-up invented work experiences that weren’t on the user’s resume and misinterpreted skills listed on their LinkedIn profile.

This is a massive liability. For customer support or sales teams, using an AI that confidently spouts nonsense is a brand-killer. You can’t build trust with customers if your tools are feeding you false information. This is precisely why professional AI tools have to be built on a foundation of verified company knowledge, not the wild west of a general-purpose language model.

Juggling too much: Cognitive overload

Here’s something you might not think about: trying to have a conversation, listen to the other person, secretly read an AI prompt, process it, and then speak naturally is incredibly difficult. Psychologists call this "cognitive splitting," and it’s exhausting.

Instead of being more engaged in the conversation, users find themselves distracted, their attention split between the person they’re talking to and the AI feed. The result? You end up sounding robotic, disconnected, and unnatural, all the things you were trying to avoid. A genuinely useful AI tool should make your job easier, not turn every conversation into a stressful multitasking nightmare. It should be drafting solid replies you can quickly approve, not adding another distracting screen to watch.

The hidden costs: Ethical and privacy concerns

Performance issues are one thing, but Cluely also wades into some very murky water when it comes to ethics, legality, and your personal data. These are red flags that anyone thinking about using the tool needs to take seriously.

Is using Cluely legal and ethical?

Let’s be blunt: using a hidden tool to misrepresent what you know can get you into serious trouble. While the app itself might exist in a legal grey area, using it could easily violate a company’s code of conduct, a university’s academic integrity policy, or even employment contracts.

It’s built on a foundation of deception, and that’s a shaky foundation for building any kind of real professional or personal relationship. Honesty and transparency matter, and Cluely encourages you to throw both out the window.

Country/Region	Legal Status	Key Concern
USA	Grey Area	Potential fraud, clear violation of most company policies
EU (GDPR)	Likely Non-Compliant	Fails to get explicit consent from all parties on a call
UK	Likely Non-Compliant	Goes against the spirit of emerging AI transparency laws

Your privacy is on the line

For Cluely to work, it needs permission to "read everything" on your screen and "listen to everything" your microphone picks up. Think about that for a second. It’s a massive privacy risk. Every password, every private message, every confidential work document is potentially being processed.

Here’s the real kicker: Cluely’s privacy policy has a glaring contradiction. It’s marketed as being undetectable, yet its terms of service state that the user is responsible for telling everyone on the call that they’re using it. This is a classic move to shift all the legal and ethical blame onto you, the user.

For any business, letting an invasive and insecure tool like this have access to sensitive customer or company data is completely out of the question. In contrast, a business-grade platform like eesel AI is built with security and privacy as top priorities. It ensures your company’s data stays your own and is never used to train external models, and it offers secure deployment options.

Cluely pricing: An overview

Cluely uses a freemium model to get you in the door. The free version is extremely limited, acting more like a quick demo to nudge you toward a paid subscription.

• Free Plan: Gives you a tiny handful of uses per day or week, which isn’t enough for any kind of regular use.

• Pro Plan: This will set you back $20 per month and unlocks unlimited use of the tool, plus access to better AI models like GPT-4.

• Team/Enterprise Plan: There is a plan for teams that adds features like shared playbooks for everyone to use and admin dashboards for managers.

While $20 a month might not sound like much, you have to weigh that against the potential cost to your reputation, your job, or your academic career if you get caught.

A better way for teams: Moving past the issues

Look, the problem Cluely is trying to solve is a real one. Teams absolutely need fast, accurate information to do their jobs well. But the answer isn’t a secret crutch for one person; it’s a powerful, shared brain for the entire organization.

This is where a professional alternative like eesel AI comes in. Instead of encouraging deception, it focuses on building genuine competence by giving your team instant access to reliable knowledge.

Here’s what makes it different:

• It’s built on your truth. eesel AI doesn’t guess or pull from the whole internet. It learns directly from your company’s own knowledge sources, your help center, past support tickets, internal wikis on Confluence, and shared Google Docs. This means every answer it provides is accurate, verified, and consistent with your brand’s voice.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to a company's knowledge sources, a better alternative discussed in Cluely reviews.:

• You can test it risk-free. Worried about how an AI will perform with real customers? With eesel AI’s simulation mode, you can test it on thousands of your past support tickets to see exactly how it performs before it ever goes live. No nasty surprises.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which provides a risk-free way to test performance, unlike the unpredictable nature highlighted in Cluely reviews.:

• It works where you work. eesel AI integrates directly into the tools your team already relies on, like Zendesk, Intercom, or Slack. It operates transparently to make your entire team faster and more efficient, and you can get it up and running in minutes.

The final word on Cluely

So, what’s the final word on Cluely? After digging through the Cluely reviews and looking at the facts, it’s clear this is a tool that’s more gimmick than game-changer. It’s a fascinating concept, but in reality, it’s too slow, too inaccurate, and too distracting to be of any real use.

Even worse, it’s built on a shaky ethical foundation that raises serious legal and privacy alarms. For an individual, it’s a dangerous crutch that gets in the way of developing real skills. For a business, it’s a security and reputational risk that simply isn’t worth it.

The future of AI in the workplace isn’t about giving one person a secret advantage. It’s about empowering entire teams to be smarter, more consistent, and more confident with the information they need to succeed.

Ready to give your team instant, accurate answers they can actually trust? See how eesel AI unifies your company knowledge to deliver reliable support, without the risks. Start your free trial today.