If you came here looking for a Cluely alternative

The search usually starts after a specific moment. Someone tries to share their screen on a Zoom call and the assistant pops up in the recording. Or a manager sees a quote in a transcript that did not come from the speaker. Or the monthly bill arrives and the math stops working for a tool that mostly hovers in the corner. The pattern is the same: the assistant was helpful in private, then leaked into a place it should not have been.

There is also the question of what the assistant is actually doing. Cluely positions itself as an assistant that sees and hears everything. That is a strong claim, and for a lot of people it ends up being more surface area than they wanted. They want the overlay, the Cmd-key recall, the answer in the moment. They do not want the assistant to be a character in the meeting.

So when people type cluely alternative into a search bar, they are usually looking for one of three things. Something quieter. Something cheaper. Or something that does not show up on a shared screen. Whisply was built around all three of those, from the first build.

The honest framing is this. Whisply does not compete with Cluely on Cluely's terms. Whisply is a Mac-native overlay that runs in the menu bar, listens through your own microphone, watches your own screen with your permission, and stays invisible to the other side of the call. There is no bot dialing in. There is no notetaker in the participant list. The other people in the conversation never see a third party, because there is not one.

That changes how the tool feels in your day. You hit Cmd+Return, the overlay appears, you ask the question, you read the answer, you dismiss it. The conversation on the other end of the call keeps going without interruption and without anyone learning that you used an assistant at all. The assist is private to you, in the same way a notebook on your desk is private to you.

The Pro Undetected tier adds Computer Use, which lets Whisply actually act on your Mac when you ask it to. It can move the mouse, type, click, and finish the small tasks that would otherwise pull you out of the conversation. It also adds support for a long list of proctoring environments out of the box, so the overlay keeps working in exam contexts that block most other software. That is closer to a sibling product than a competitor to a meeting copilot.

On price, the gap is real. Cluely's paid plan sits in the $20 per month range for the basic tier and climbs higher for the premium one. Whisply Pro is $19.99 monthly or $11.99 on annual billing, with models included, so there is no separate OpenAI or Anthropic bill on top. The Free tier is enough for most students and individual contributors to get real work done without paying anything.

On privacy, Whisply ships with system-level content protection on by default. The overlay window is excluded from screen recording APIs, which means it does not appear when you share your screen on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack huddles, Discord, or in a QuickTime recording. Cluely has had public incidents where the overlay surfaced on shared screens. That is the kind of thing that matters more the higher the stakes of your call.

On scope, Cluely is a meeting assistant first. Whisply is an overlay first. That sounds like a small difference and it changes everything. The overlay model means Whisply is just as useful while you are reading a contract, debugging a stack trace, drafting an email, or sitting in a live exam, as it is during a call. It does not need a meeting to justify itself.

The table below lists the tools that come up most often when people start shopping around. Whisply is at the top because this is the Whisply site and we are not pretending otherwise, but the strengths and weaknesses for every entry are written straight. If your work is mostly recorded sales calls and you want a transcript with action items, a meeting bot like Otter or Fireflies will probably serve you better than Whisply. If you want a private real-time overlay that the other side never sees, Whisply is the one that was built for that.

A note on what is missing from the list. We left off tools that are Windows-only, tools that have shut down or pivoted, and tools that have not shipped a public Mac build. We also left off Apple Intelligence as a head-to-head comparison because it is a system feature, not a competing product, and it does not do real-time meeting assist in the same way.

Read the list with your own use case in mind. The right answer depends on whether you want help during the conversation or after it, whether you can install third-party software on your work Mac, and whether anyone else on the call needs to know an assistant is in the room.

Download the Mac app from the download page, drag it into Applications, and open it. The first launch walks through three permissions: Screen Recording so the assistant can see what you are looking at, Microphone so it can hear the conversation, and Accessibility if you want Computer Use on Pro Undetected. Each one has a plain English explanation in the setup flow and nothing is enabled until you say yes.

After that, the only thing to learn is the hotkey. Cmd+Return summons the overlay. Type a question, get an answer, dismiss the overlay. That is the whole loop. There is a longer Docs page if you want to wire up custom prompts or change defaults, but most people are productive inside the first ten minutes.

If you decide Whisply is not for you, the uninstall is one drag to the Trash and one revoke in System Settings to remove the permissions. We do not bury an unsubscribe flow inside a chat with support. Cancel from the account page, the next bill stops.