Hmm, they are fundamentally different concepts like the first person explained, but in the way that you mentioned, they are interchangeable sometimes, when you're referring to physical objects. And thinking about intangible things like the mind, I realised that you can ALSO use both! Like "my mind is really cluttered" or "my thoughts are in a mess". But there are situations where you can only use "mess", like "the organisation of the project was messy" but you can't say that it's cluttered.