tried 4 alternatives to sensei ai over 6 weeks, here is what stuck and what didnt
so the browser tool i had been on for like a year just kinda fell apart on me in march. it was lagging on basically every other question, the overlay flickered every time i tabbed back to my notes, and twice it froze halfway through a behavioral round and i had to bluff a thirty second pause. my mock partner caught me going dead silent on a call last month and asked what was up. told them my tool was busted again. they just laughed. why are you still using a chrome extension for an interview, they said.
fair honestly.
so i went looking. six weeks, four other tools, mostly tested across mock panels with friends, plus a couple of recruiter screens that i did not really care about and used as test runs. job hunt was a mix of senior backend and a couple of pm rounds, which is a weird combo because behavioral and system design dont share much DNA tooling wise.
the first one i tried was an open source overlay thing i pulled off github. setup ate an entire saturday. finally got it transcribing the audio but the answer side was just a basic chatgpt call with no context, no resume, no role. answers were technically correct but read like a textbook. also the overlay was visible during a screenshare test i did with Derek. nope, not happening.
next up was another browser extension competitor. felt eerily similar to the one i was already mad at, which was the whole problem. suggestions came with a couple seconds of delay every single time. i could feel myself stalling waiting for the box to fill in. recruiter on a screen i did not care about asked if my mic was cutting out. that killed it for me.
then i tried a desktop app, coding focused. real installer, real overlay, looked promising at first. behavioral side was basically not there though. system design rounds were fine. the moment my pm round started asking about prioritization frameworks the suggestions dried up on me. ended up flipping back to my notes which was the exact thing i was trying to avoid.
the one i ended up sticking with is also a desktop app but covered behavioral and system design in one place, no session cap that i ever bumped into, and the overlay actually disappeared during screenshare. ran it through six panels in late march and got the offer i was hoping for last week.
not naming names in the OP because i dont want this turning into a shill thread. happy to share specifics down in the comments. anyone else burned out on the chrome extension format and made the jump to a real desktop app?