Souffleur vs Cluely
Both put an AI assistant on top of your screen that the people watching your screen share cannot see. One charges $149.99 a month for the part that makes it work. The other is free and shows you its test data.
The short version. Cluely is a funded product with mobile apps, meeting notes, a support team and a signed installer, and it keeps screen-share invisibility in its most expensive tier. Souffleur is a free, open-source desktop overlay that does the invisibility, the screen reading and the call transcription, costs nothing, and publishes the capture test behind its claim. If you want a polished suite, pay for Cluely. If you want the overlay and want to verify it, take Souffleur.
Side by side
| Feature | Souffleur | Cluely |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, forever | Free tier, Pro $19.99/mo, Pro + Undetectability $149.99/mo |
| Hidden from screen share | Included | Only on the $149.99/mo plan |
| Invisibility test published | Yes — 151 frames, with a control | Not published |
| Open source | Yes, whole app | No |
| Account required | None | Yes |
| Where your screen goes | Straight to your own provider, or through Souffleur's server to Gemini on the free key | Through Cluely's service |
| AI model | Any Gemini, OpenAI or OpenAI-compatible model, your key | Chosen for you, included in the price |
| Reads your screen | Yes | Yes |
| Transcribes the call | Yes, into the chat box | Yes |
| Answers from your CV | Yes, up to 4 PDFs | Yes, file uploads |
| Desktop | macOS and Windows | macOS and Windows |
| Mobile | No | iOS and Android |
| Saved meeting notes | No | Yes |
| Signed and notarised installer | No — Homebrew works around it | Yes |
| Support | GitHub issues | Priority support on paid plans |
Cluely details from cluely.com/pricing, read in September 2026. Prices change — check before you buy.
What you actually pay
Cluely's invisibility sits in the Pro + Undetectability plan at $149.99 a month. The $19.99 Pro plan gives you the assistant, but the overlay is visible to screen-sharing software — which, for the case most people are buying it for, is the whole feature.
Souffleur costs nothing and has no plan to be in. It starts on a free key Souffleur provides, up to a daily limit. Past that, what you pay is your own API bill: you paste a Gemini or OpenAI key and the provider charges you for the tokens you use. A screenshot plus a few hundred words of answer is a fraction of a cent on current flash-tier models, and Gemini's free tier covers a lot of interviews on its own. There is no tier where the invisibility is switched off, because it is the reason the app exists.
“Invisible” is a claim. Ask who tested it
Every tool in this category says it is invisible. Apple's own developer forums have an Apple engineer stating there is no public API for preventing screen capture, and the flag these apps depend on has been reported broken across macOS releases. That makes the claim worth checking rather than believing.
So Souffleur was measured. Three windows were placed on screen — one with
content protection on, one excluded through a ScreenCaptureKit content filter,
and one unprotected control — then captured through a live
30 fps SCStream, the same path Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and
OBS use.
| Window | Frames it appeared in |
|---|---|
| Control, unprotected | 151 of 151 — 100% |
sharingType = .none | 0 of 151 |
excludingWindows filter | 0 of 151 |
The control is the part that matters. Without a window that should have been captured, “nothing appeared” proves only that the test was broken. The full method, the raw counts and the caveats are published, and the harness is in the repository so you can run it on your own machine.
Cluely has not published an equivalent test. That is not an accusation that it does not work — it is the reason one of these two claims can be checked and the other has to be trusted.
Where Cluely is the better choice
Worth saying plainly, because the comparison is useless if it only runs one way:
- You want it on your phone. Cluely has iOS and Android apps. Souffleur is desktop only.
- You want meeting notes that persist. Cluely records, summarises and keeps transcripts across meetings. Souffleur transcribes into the chat box and forgets.
- You use it all day and do not want to handle an API key. Cluely includes the model in the price. Souffleur's free key has a daily limit; past it, you create a key of your own, which takes a few minutes and a payment method at the provider.
- You want an installer that just opens. Cluely is signed and notarised. Souffleur is not, so macOS installs go through Homebrew and Windows shows SmartScreen once.
- You want someone to email. Cluely has support staff. Souffleur has an issue tracker and one maintainer.
Where Souffleur is the better choice
- Invisibility is the feature you came for. It is included, not a $149.99 upgrade.
- You want to read the code. The Swift that hides the window, the capture pipeline and the prompts are all in the repository.
- You do not want your screen crossing someone else's server. With your own key, requests go from your machine to your provider, with no service in the middle. (The free key is the exception: it passes through Souffleur's server to Gemini, which logs none of it.)
- You want to pick the model. Any Gemini or OpenAI model, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — including a local one.
- You want to verify rather than trust. The test harness ships with the app.
Other open-source options
Souffleur is not the only free alternative, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. OpenCluely is aimed squarely at DSA and coding-round interviews, Pluely is a very small Tauri build, and Natively leans towards meeting notes and local RAG. What Souffleur adds to that list is the published verification, first-person interview mode driven by your own CV, and the same feature set on Windows as on macOS.
Switching takes about two minutes
On macOS:
brew install --cask akshatgg/tap/souffleur
On Windows, take the .exe from the
download section. Then ask your first question on the
free key, or paste an API key of your own, and press
Shift + Space to show and hide the overlay.
The docs cover providers, shortcuts, call transcription
and interview mode.
What neither of them does
Hiding a window from screen capture is not the same as being undetectable. A camera pointed at your screen, a second machine recording the room, a proctoring agent with kernel-level access, or your eyes visibly tracking text will all still show something. Both tools exclude a window from a capture stream. That is the claim, and it is worth knowing where it stops.
Check the rules that apply to you before using either of these in an interview or an exam.