Cluely AI rocketed to a $7M ARR and Andreessen Horowitz backing with a simple, controversial promise: an invisible AI copilot that gives you an edge. Its “cheating to win” marketing, centered on a tool that sees your screen and hears your calls without ever joining as a participant, engineered viral growth and defined a new category of always-on assistance. But as the hype cycle churns, the real story is the rapidly diversifying landscape of Cluely alternatives, forcing a choice between venture-backed polish, enterprise precision, and open-source privacy.
The market Cluely helped create is no longer a one-horse race. It’s fragmenting into distinct philosophies. On one side are the vertical specialists. Winn AI, an Israeli startup with $17M in funding, targets sales teams with a “No-Typing CRM” promise. It’s less about being a universal brain and more about being a ruthlessly efficient sales admin, automating call notes, CRM updates, and follow-ups. They coined "Vibe Selling". Similarly, Aside AI acts as an AI sales coach, pulling best practices from Slack, HubSpot, and past calls to surface in-the-moment training. Both Winn and Aside trade Cluely’s broad, individual-user appeal for a clear, ROI-driven pitch to enterprise buyers: we make your sales team faster and smarter.
But the most significant challenge to Cluely’s dominance comes not from a funded competitor, but from the open-source community. Pluely has emerged as a direct, privacy-first rival, built on the principles of transparency and user control. It’s a classic tech narrative: the lean, community-driven project taking on the well-funded incumbent.
The Open Source Disruption
Pluely’s entire value proposition is a point-by-point rebuttal of the commercial AI assistant model. Where Cluely’s desktop app is a hefty 270MB, Pluely is a featherweight 10MB. It claims to use 50% less CPU and RAM, launching in under 100 milliseconds. The core difference, however, is philosophical. Cluely is a cloud-based SaaS product. Pluely runs entirely locally. According to its developers, it sends zero data, telemetry, or logs to remote servers, with all chat history saved on the user’s machine.
This isn't just about privacy; it’s about control. Pluely is built with a Rust back-end and React front-end using the Tauri framework, and it’s designed for total customization. Users can connect it to any LLM—OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, or even local models via Ollama. They can choose their own speech-to-text provider, from Deepgram to ElevenLabs. Keyboard shortcuts, window transparency, and system audio capture are all user-configurable. It delivers the same core functionality as Cluely—an undetectable, real-time AI layer for meetings, coding, and deep work—but hands the keys entirely to the user.
This creates a stark choice in the market for AI copilots. Cluely, with its viral marketing and slick user experience, represents the polished, plug-and-play future of AI work companions. It’s powerful, easy to use, and backed by a major VC firm that ensures continuous development. The trade-off is a subscription fee and a cloud-based architecture that requires a degree of trust.
Winn AI and Aside AI represent the pragmatic, enterprise-grade path. They solve specific, expensive business problems—namely, sales inefficiency and knowledge gaps. Their appeal is not to the individual power user but to the sales operations leader or Chief Revenue Officer who can draw a straight line from the software’s adoption to the company’s bottom line. Their focus on deep CRM and communications integration makes them sticky, defensible players in the B2B space.
Pluely, meanwhile, champions the ethos of the power user, the developer, and the privacy-conscious. It’s free, transparent, and infinitely malleable. Its stealth capabilities—hiding from the dock, taskbar, and even screen shares—outmaneuver Cluely’s own “undetectable” claims. For individuals or organizations in sensitive industries, or for those who simply want to own their tech stack, Pluely offers a compelling alternative that decouples powerful AI assistance from the SaaS ecosystem.
The rise of these Cluely alternatives signals the maturation of the AI assistant market. The initial “wow” factor of a real-time copilot is giving way to more nuanced demands around specific use cases, data privacy, and cost. Cluely may have written the playbook on how to go viral, but the next chapter will be defined by the choice between its all-in-one vision and a growing ecosystem of specialized, private, and open-source competitors. The war for your desktop is just getting started.
