Cluing

Cluing is no longer adequately described as a web highlighter. The product still starts with capture: users can save webpages, passages, PDFs, Kindle highlights, YouTube material, social posts, emails/newsletters and notes into Topics and Clusters. In 2026 it has expanded into a searchable knowledge layer, AI Chat, Canvas, a Knowledge Graph, MCP connectivity, custom connectors, dynamic skills and hosted agents that can keep working after the user's computer is closed.¹²³

That change matters because older Collabwriting-era material describes only a fraction of today's surface. AiToolMap therefore treats current Cluing as a combined research/knowledge-management and agent-workspace product rather than carrying old web-clipping judgments forward.

This is a desk review. AiToolMap did not install the extension, create a workspace, spend credits or run a hosted agent.

Cluing's durable advantage is the capture layer. The current Chrome extension can save text from webpages and PDFs, import Kindle highlights, capture social and video material, receive forwarded email/newsletters and organize content into searchable Topics, Clusters and a Knowledge Graph.²

The key distinction from a generic notes app is provenance. Cluing is built around preserving the source, selected passage and user reasoning together. That is especially relevant to research-heavy work where an AI-generated conclusion is more useful if the underlying evidence remains easy to retrieve.

The product also supports collaboration: Topics can be shared, role-based access can be applied, comments can stay attached to material, and content can be exported or moved into services such as Google Docs, Notion, Gmail and Outlook.¹²

For researchers, analysts, consultants and legal/compliance users, that source-context architecture is more meaningful than the generic second-brain label.

Cluing's AI layer is deliberately multi-model. Its current Chrome listing says AI Chat can work with frontier models from Claude, ChatGPT/OpenAI, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek, while stored Topics can be brought directly into conversations as context.²

That means Cluing is not a single-model product. AiToolMap does not transfer benchmark results for Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok or DeepSeek directly into a Cluing score. The product-level question is whether Cluing routes, grounds and operationalizes those models effectively using the user's stored context. The fixed panel contains no current controlled test answering that question.

Cluing also exposes an editable AI Canvas and MCP integration, allowing external MCP-compatible agents to read from and write back to the workspace. This can reduce copy-paste friction and makes the knowledge base potentially useful as a shared context layer rather than a closed notes destination.²

Cluing now has iOS and Android apps. The Apple listing identifies Collabwriting Inc. as the developer and describes capture, collaboration, Topics/Clusters, AI Chat and AI Canvas. Current version history also references Hosted AI Agents, scheduled autonomous agents, dynamic skills, custom connectors and one-click website/app publishing.⁴

Google Play reports more than 1,000 Android downloads and an August 18, 2026 update. It describes the same core capture and AI-workspace functionality. No representative aggregate star rating was exposed in the captured listing, so none is used numerically.⁵

The Android scale is modest, but mobile matters strategically because Cluing's hosted-agent proposition is partly that work can continue without a user's main computer remaining active.

Product Hunt currently shows Cluing at 4.9/5 from 9 reviews and roughly 1.7K followers. Review summaries emphasize easier online research, clean UI, collaboration and Notion/integration workflows.³

The sample is tiny and launch communities can skew toward early adopters and makers, so AiToolMap records it separately and applies a strong small-sample discount rather than blending it mechanically with Chrome.

The two populations still converge on one qualitative point: the established strength of Cluing appears to be research capture and organization rather than independently proven agent intelligence.

Cluing's current site presents Free at $0/month with capture integrations, unlimited snippets/topics, five clusters, five guests and selected AI models. Pro is shown at $12/month when billed yearly ($144/year), with 2,500 credits per month, every frontier AI model, unlimited clusters, deep research and shared memory. The displayed Team configuration is $140/month billed yearly ($1,680/year) for three people, one agent seat and 8,000 credits per month.¹

The interface also exposes configurable tier families, so these should be read as current reference configurations rather than universal prices for every seat/credit combination.

The free tier is substantial enough to evaluate the capture/knowledge architecture before paying. Pro becomes more attractive when the same stored context is repeatedly reused across several model families. Team pricing is harder to judge without hands-on evidence of how quickly real agent workloads consume credits.

AiToolMap stores these inputs for later normalization but does not calculate the final rating yet.

All 50 mandatory members of `ai-review-panel-2026-08-v4` were audited individually under methodology v1.8. Two panel sources produced usable exact-current-product evidence: Apple App Store and Google Play. Forty-one produced no relevant exact-product result after source-specific searching; seven were inaccessible in the current retrieval workflow and were not treated as negative evidence.

Because the fixed panel is thin for a smaller product, AiToolMap expanded beyond it. The current Chrome Web Store listing and Product Hunt page were opened and read, together with Cluing's current website, pricing, Help Center deletion guidance, privacy policy and terms. This gives reasonably strong evidence for what the product does and how the established browser extension is received, but much thinner independent evidence for the new hosted-agent system.

The most consequential 2026 feature is Hosted Agents. Cluing positions them as agents running on its infrastructure, remaining active after the user's computer is closed, sharing team context, using evolving skills and custom connectors, accepting tasks from teammates and publishing websites, dashboards or apps.¹³

Product Hunt's current launch page reports that Hosted Agents ranked #5 of the day on August 19, 2026. Maker material describes remotely continuing work, reusable connectors, encrypted credentials and workflows that can be handed between desktop, phone and teammates.³

Those are meaningful product signals, but not independent reliability tests. AiToolMap credits Cluing for shipping an unusually integrated agent/workspace design while keeping claims about autonomous execution provisional.

The knowledge-management layer has several years of product history under the former Collabwriting identity. The hosted-agent layer is new enough that durability, error recovery, permission handling, connector safety and long-running-task reliability still need independent testing.

The Chrome Web Store provides the strongest exact-product numeric user signal currently available. The current Cluing extension is Featured, follows Google's recommended practices, has a 4.8/5 rating from 32 ratings and about 8,000 users. The listing was updated August 12, 2026.²

That is encouraging but not mass-market evidence. Thirty-two ratings support a conclusion of strong early browser sentiment, not mature-market reliability.

The Store description matches the current product direction: capture from web/PDF/social/video, team organization, AI Chat, Canvas, MCP integration and exports. The developer also declares that data is not sold to third parties and that personally identifiable information and website content are handled by the extension.²

Cluing's current website and Chrome listing state ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification. The website also describes shared connectors with encrypted secrets and hosted agents operating on Cluing infrastructure.¹²

The public privacy policy, however, is dated September 26, 2022. It describes account and usage data, logs, analytics/support providers, retention and GDPR/CCPA rights.⁶ The age of that policy is a transparency weakness because the product has changed substantially since 2022, particularly around AI routing, connectors and hosted agents.

A newer Help Center article provides a clearer deletion rule: deleting a personal Cluing account immediately deletes data from the personal workspace and removes the user's email from newsletter/support systems. For Team Workspaces, personal identifiers are anonymized while contributed content and comments can remain for team continuity.⁷

The Chrome Web Store additionally says the extension handles personally identifiable information and website content and carries the developer declaration that data is not sold outside approved-use cases.²

For sensitive professional material, ISO certification and explicit deletion behavior are positives. The mismatch between a rapidly evolving agent product and a 2022 public privacy-policy date remains the main disclosure concern.

There is no current fixed-panel benchmark for Cluing as an application. Benchmarks such as ARC, SWE-bench, Aider, BFCL, LM Arena or Artificial Analysis evaluate models or agents under configurations that do not map cleanly to a multi-model knowledge workspace.

Likewise, there is no large exact-current Cluing population on G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius or SoftwareReviews in this cycle. G2 and Capterra therefore contribute no numeric input; their shared Digital Markets independence family receives no duplicated voting power. Trustpilot produced no applicable exact-product signal and would remain qualitative-only under methodology v1.8.

The evidence gap matters most around Hosted Agents. Cluing makes ambitious claims about continuous execution, publishing, connectors and shared skills. The surfaces are live, but this review cycle does not independently measure failure rate, task-completion quality, security isolation or credit efficiency.

Cluing is particularly relevant to researchers, analysts, consultants, lawyers, compliance teams, cybersecurity professionals and content teams that repeatedly collect evidence from the web and need exact references later.

Individual users should start with Free and evaluate whether Topics, Clusters and source capture genuinely replace part of their current browser/notes workflow. Pro is most rational when the same stored context is used regularly across several frontier models or Deep Research.

Teams should evaluate Hosted Agents separately from the mature capture layer. The architecture is promising, especially for shared context and work that should continue off-device, but buyers should run representative workflows before treating the agent layer as production infrastructure.