Interview Solver does one thing well. Coding problems, specifically the kind you’d encounter in a timed technical screen: it listens to the question, suggests an approach, and gives you something to work with when you’re stuck. For that narrow use case, it’s genuinely useful.
The problem is that coding rounds are maybe 30-40% of your total interview time at most companies. The rest is behavioral questions, system design, hiring manager conversation, and recruiter screens. Interview Solver doesn’t cover any of that. So you’re paying $39-49/month for a tool that helps you with roughly a third of the process.
What Interview Solver actually handles
It’s a desktop app, which is good. Desktop architecture means it captures system audio and displays its overlay outside your screen share region, so it’s not visible to interviewers the way browser-based tools can be. The stealth capability is real and it works.
The coverage, though, is limited by design. It was built specifically for coding interviews. If you’re preparing for companies that use algorithmic assessments heavily (FAANG-tier, some quant firms), that’s the right tool for that specific round. If you’re interviewing at a company with 4 rounds where only one is coding, you’re using Interview Solver for one interview and winging the other three.
The full-interview tools worth looking at
Craqly is the one I’d start with if you want broader coverage. It handles behavioral questions, coding, and general interview assistance in a single desktop app. The free tier gives you 30 minutes of session time, which is enough to test it for real before paying anything. Pro is $38/month (3 hours of session time). Pro + Stealth at $59/month is the tier with 10 hours of session time and explicit screen-share stealth, which is the one most active job seekers end up on. The coverage difference compared to Interview Solver is real: Craqly surfaces relevant context during behavioral questions, not just coding prompts.
Final Round AI is the most mature option in this space. At roughly $79/month it’s the most expensive, but the coaching features are deeper than most competitors and it has a longer track record. If you’re doing a months-long search for senior roles, the cost-per-offer math often works out. For a short sprint of 3-4 weeks of active interviewing, the price is harder to justify.
LockedIn AI covers more of the interview than Interview Solver, including behavioral prompts. It runs in the browser, though, which is a real architectural limitation. Browser extensions are visible during screen sharing and can be flagged by proctoring software. It’s $50-70/month for a tool with detection risk that a $38/month desktop app doesn’t have. That’s a hard sell for me, though I recognize the UI is polished and some people like it.
Interview Coder sits in roughly the same category as Interview Solver but is macOS-only. Worth noting if you’re on Windows. Coverage is also limited to coding.
Natively is free and open-source. The setup friction is real but if you’re technically comfortable with it, the value is obvious. I don’t have good data on how well it handles behavioral question context vs. coding, so take that limitation into account.
What to actually think about when choosing
Two questions that cut through most of this:
- What percentage of your upcoming interviews are coding-only rounds? If the answer is most of them (quant shop, some big tech pipelines), Interview Solver is a defensible choice. If behavioral and system design are significant parts of your process, you need broader coverage.
- How risk-tolerant are you about detection? Desktop apps are structurally better for this than browser tools. If you’re doing interviews where screen sharing is mandatory or proctoring software is used, this matters more than most vendors will tell you directly.
The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 found that AI-assisted coding is now mainstream among working developers. It follows that interviewers at technical companies are increasingly aware of AI assistance tools. The question for candidates isn’t whether to use them; it’s whether to use them in a way that makes the interview about your capabilities rather than about the tool.
A quick note on pricing reality: BLS data on software developer compensation shows median salaries in the US above $130K. At that level, a $20-30/month difference between tools is economically irrelevant if one tool meaningfully increases your offer rate. The instinct to optimize on price when the outcome is a $150K job is a common error.
The actual recommendation
If you’re only doing coding-heavy interviews at companies with algorithmic screens, Interview Solver is a reasonable tool at a reasonable price. Start with Craqly’s free tier anyway. 30 minutes will tell you whether full-interview coverage changes how you feel going into a behavioral round.
If your pipeline has behavioral interviews, system design discussions, or hiring manager conversations, Interview Solver isn’t the right primary tool. You’d be leaving most of the interview unassisted, which is roughly the same as not using a tool at all for most of your rounds.
I’ll admit I’m uncertain about one thing: how much behavioral question assistance actually moves offer rates vs. coding assistance. I haven’t seen good controlled data on this from any vendor, including Craqly. My intuition is that it matters a lot at senior levels, where the behavioral rounds have more weight. But that’s an opinion, not a measurement.