Cluely vs Otter.ai: Live AI Help vs the Meeting Bot

Otter.ai is one of the most established AI notetakers: its Otter Notetaker bot joins your meeting as a visible participant, transcribes live with speaker identification, and builds a searchable knowledge base of everything your team has discussed.

Cluely works differently. Nothing joins your call. The desktop app captures system audio on your Mac or Windows machine, watches your screen for context, and surfaces suggested answers, notes, and follow-ups in a translucent overlay only you can see — during the meeting, when it can still change the outcome.

At a glance

Comparison based on publicly available information as of March 2026. See Otter.ai's site for their latest pricing and features.

The core difference: during the call vs after it

Otter's value arrives after the meeting: a transcript, a summary, and a knowledge base you can query later. That's genuinely useful for record-keeping — but by the time you're reading it, the conversation is over. Otter's newer Meeting Agent can answer spoken questions during a meeting, but it draws on your organization's past meeting data and rolled out Zoom-first.

Cluely is built for the moment a hard question lands: hit a keybind and it suggests what to say next, using both the live conversation and whatever is on your screen — a pricing page, a spec, a candidate's résumé. Notes and follow-up emails are generated too, but they're the byproduct, not the product.

A bot in the room vs software on your machine

Otter Notetaker joins meetings as a named guest that every participant can see. Some teams like that visibility for consent reasons; plenty of users find it awkward, and 'who invited the bot?' is a real conversation-opener. Otter has added bot-free desktop recording as an alternative capture path.

Cluely never joins the call at all. It captures system audio locally on your machine, so there's nothing in the participant list on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, or any other app that plays audio through your computer — no per-app integration required. One honest caveat: recording-consent rules still apply to you either way, and Cluely's screen-share invisibility is a paid Pro + Undetectability feature with documented app-support limitations.

Pricing compared

Otter's free tier is measured in minutes: 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation, with 20 AI Chat queries. Otter Pro runs $16.99/month, or about $8.33/month billed annually.

Cluely's free Starter plan includes 3 meetings with limited AI responses — enough to try it on real calls. Cluely Pro is $19.99/month, or $11.99/month billed annually, with unlimited meetings and unlimited AI responses. The Pro + Undetectability plan adds invisibility to screen shares and recordings. Cluely costs a few dollars more than Otter — you're paying for live help, not just the archive.

Which should you pick?

Related: Cluely vs Granola · The best Otter.ai alternatives · What is an AI notetaker?