InterviewMan vs. Cluely

ok so the dumbest thing i did last month was sign up for Cluely at midnight because my friend Marcus would not stop texting me about it. he has been grinding leetcode every night for his Amazon loop and he kept going "just try both, just try both" and i already had InterviewMan but fine, i grabbed his referral link and made an account while eating leftover pad thai at my kitchen counter. woke up the next morning and immediately ran a mock screen share, Zoom call with myself, recording going, and the Cluely overlay was literally sitting right there in the playback. fully visible. i sat there rewinding it three times because i thought maybe i set something up wrong. nope, turns out you need their seventy five dollar a month plan before stealth actually works. i pay twelve bucks a month for InterviewMan on annual, $144 for the whole year, stealth included on every plan from day one, and this man wants me to spend $900 a year for the privilege of the overlay not showing up in recordings. i texted Marcus "$144 versus $900" and he sent back a picture of his bank account with "bro i am unemployed" underneath it lol

the stealth thing really messed with my head though because i had already done the paranoid detective thing with InterviewMan a few weeks earlier. recorded myself on Zoom, scrubbed the recording frame by frame, checked every running process in the system. nothing. twenty something hiding methods, hides from the dock, blocks WebRTC leaks, masks the process name, fifty seven thousand people have used it and 4.8 stars from 257 reviews and they say nobody has ever been caught. after my own test i believe every word of that. Cluely's stealth only kicks in at $75 a month, desktop only, i tried it on my iPad and there was zero hiding going on whatsoever. Marcus heard seventy five dollars just for stealth and cringed because again, this man is literally sending me bank balance screenshots lol

Marcus came over the next day and we tested the response time together and this is where things got really ugly. Business Insider had documented a 5 to 10 second lag between the interviewer asking a question and Cluely showing anything on screen. i timed it myself sitting there with Marcus watching over my shoulder and yeah, that kind of pause where an interviewer would absolutely think you were reading something or just completely spacing out. Marcus goes "bro if i sat there for ten seconds during my Amazon round they would just end the call" and he is not wrong. then i read that multiple reviewers flagged hallucinations where Cluely straight up invented work experiences and qualifications that were not on the resume. ten seconds of silence AND it might fabricate your work history? Marcus kept looking back at the lag we just timed and i could tell he was doing the math. InterviewMan covers behavioral, technical, coding, system design, works with Zoom Teams Meet Chime Webex Lark plus HackerRank CoderPad Codility, runs on five platforms and the suggestions actually come through fast enough that you can use them mid conversation. Cluely tries to cover way more ground, meetings and sales and exams and first dates and everything, which ok cool but Marcus was only interviewing and every person i know shopping for these tools is in the same boat

the breach was the thing that finished it. mid 2025 a hacking group found Cluely's developers had left an admin password sitting in a public GitHub repo. weak API protections meant attackers got into personal info and interview transcripts and screenshots for over 83,000 users. i pulled up the article on my laptop and Marcus read it over my shoulder for like two solid minutes without saying a word. for a tool that records some of the most sensitive moments of your professional life, i mean. InterviewMan has not had anything like that and at this point Marcus closed the Cluely tab on his phone and that was kind of that

he went with InterviewMan, ran it through all four of his Amazon rounds, got the offer last week. if you need something that handles meetings and sales calls and exams and whatever else then fine, Cluely at seventy five bucks makes sense for you. but Marcus was shopping for interview help and so was every other person who has asked me about this and at twelve bucks a month with stealth that actually works on every plan and device it was not even close. he texts me now like once a week with "i owe you twelve dollars" which i think is his version of a thank you lol

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