Fireflies.ai vs Sembly AI
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in AI Meeting Note Takers for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentSembly AI compared with Fireflies.ai
Fireflies is the larger platform with more languages, a much bigger integration catalogue, and conversation intelligence, metered by storage minutes and AI credits. Sembly is unmetered on time, narrower on integrations, and stronger on structured project outputs and consent. Fireflies for breadth; Sembly for professional services process discipline.
Choose Fireflies.ai if
Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price.
Choose Sembly AI if
Project management offices, consultancies, agencies, and IT outsourcing firms who need structured meeting records with tasks, risks, and issues detected automatically, plus a documented consent trail, and who do not need a free plan to get started.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fireflies.ai | Sembly AI |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Meeting Notes | Meeting Notes |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly) | $10 per month billed annually (Basic, single user), $17 month to month (free trial) |
| Pricing model | Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly. | Per-seat subscription with unlimited meetings and unlimited transcription on every paid tier. What is metered is AI work, through monthly credits per user, plus clients and brand packages per workspace, native automations per user, and a meeting history window. |
| Free plan | Free forever with unlimited transcription and limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits, Zoom, Meet, and Teams support, 100-plus language transcription, real-time notes, search, AskFred, and audio or video upload. | No |
| Free trial | No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path | A $0 Free Trial plan: 1 user, 1 meeting hour, 750 monthly credits plus a 1,750 one-time bonus, 2 months of history |
| Best for | Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price. | Project management offices, consultancies, agencies, and IT outsourcing firms who need structured meeting records with tasks, risks, and issues detected automatically, plus a documented consent trail, and who do not need a free plan to get started. |
| Setup time | Fifteen minutes for basic capture: connect a calendar, confirm which meetings the bot should join, and install the Chrome extension if you use Google Meet. Configuring CRM field mapping, AI Skills, and topic trackers adds a few hours. | Fifteen minutes to capture, longer to configure properly. Connect the calendar, set the bot's join policy, then spend time on custom note templates, custom vocabulary, and the automation library, because the default output is much less useful than a configured one. |
| Learning curve | Moderate, and higher than any other product in this set purely because of surface area. The transcription and summary layer is immediately obvious; AI Skills, conversation intelligence, the rules engine, and voice agents each need their own learning session. | Moderate, and higher than most of this category. The product's vocabulary is programme management vocabulary, and getting value from risk and issue detection means someone deciding what the workspace should do with a detected risk. |
| Platforms | Web app, Desktop application, iOS and Android apps, Chrome extension for Google Meet, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, Aircall and RingCentral dialers, MCP server | Web, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex, Mobile access, Microphone recording for in-person meetings, Philips SmartMeeting and VoiceTracer hardware partnership |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Enterprise tier), Zero data retention for AI training | SOC 2 Type II, Microsoft 365 Certification, GDPR, HIPAA on the MAX tier |
| Founded | 2016 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida, United States (previously Pleasanton, California), with a distributed team across 20 countries and 47 cities | New York, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed with an equity crowdfunding component |
Strengths and limitations
Fireflies.ai
Strengths
- The broadest capture coverage in the category: bots for the major platforms, email invitation, Chrome extension, mobile and desktop apps, dialer integrations, and file upload.
- More than 100 transcription languages with auto-detection, plus a multi-language mode for calls that switch mid-conversation, which no competitor here matches.
- Pro at $10 per seat annually is remarkable capability per dollar, including video recording, AI Skills, voice agents, and unlimited integrations.
- AskFred and AI summaries are available on the free tier, so the assistant is not held hostage to an upgrade, though summaries are limited until you pay.
Limitations
- Dual metering on storage minutes and AI credits makes real cost hard to forecast, and the free tier's 400-minute pool is shared across the entire team rather than per user.
- The product is built around the meeting bot; bot-free recording exists through the Chrome extension and desktop app, but the bot remains the default workflow.
- Product sprawl is real: voice agents, an email assistant, a task manager, 200-plus AI Skills, and conversation intelligence in one subscription means an unavoidable navigation cost and inconsistent polish across surfaces.
- Customer-count claims are inconsistent across the vendor's own pages, more than 1 million companies on the homepage against more than 500,000 on the about page, which is not a great signal for a data-driven buyer.
Sembly AI
Strengths
- Unlimited meetings and unlimited transcription on every tier including the $10 Basic plan, so there is no meter to model at all.
- Consent tracking on the Pro tier is genuinely unique in this comparison set and is the only built-in answer to two-party consent requirements anyone here offers.
- Retention settings on Pro rather than gated behind an enterprise contract, which is unusually generous placement for a governance feature.
- Automatic risk, issue, and event detection reflects real programme management vocabulary and is not something a generic summarizer produces.
Limitations
- No real free plan: the $0 Free Trial covers a single meeting hour, where most competitors give away hours a month.
- Credits expire at month end on Basic and Pro, so a quiet month does not bank capacity for a busy one.
- Basic is one user per workspace, so the smallest team plan is $20 a seat with no intermediate step.
- Bot-based capture with a vendor-named participant visible in every call, and no local silent capture path.
Pricing compared
Fireflies.ai
Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly.
- Free$0
- Pro$18
- Business$29
- Enterprise$39
On sticker price Fireflies is the cheapest capable product here: $10 per seat annually for video recording, an email assistant, voice agents, AI Skills, a task manager, and unlimited integrations undercuts everything except Granola's Business tier, and it does considerably more. The complication is the metering. Storage minutes and AI credits are two forecasting problems most buyers will not do properly, the 400-minute free pool is team-wide rather than per seat, and unlimited storage costs $19 a seat. Model your actual meeting hours before comparing this to a flat-fee rival; if your usage is modest and multilingual, Fireflies is outstanding value, and if it is heavy, price Business rather than Pro.
Sembly AI
Per-seat subscription with unlimited meetings and unlimited transcription on every paid tier. What is metered is AI work, through monthly credits per user, plus clients and brand packages per workspace, native automations per user, and a meeting history window.
- Basic$10
- Pro$20
- MAX$30
- EnterpriseCustom
Sembly is the rare product here where a heavy calendar costs exactly the same as a light one. Someone in 20 meetings a week pays $20 per seat per month billed annually on Pro, about $240 a year, with unlimited meetings, unlimited transcription across 40-plus languages, unlimited video recording, consent tracking, retention settings, risk and issue detection, MCP access, and a two-year archive. That is competitive with Otter Business and Bluedot Pro and comes with governance features neither of them ships. The catch is the AI output meter: five generated documents a month is not many if deliverables are your reason for buying, and the fix is MAX at $30 a seat, which is expensive. Judged as structured meeting intelligence for a professional services firm, Pro is good value. Judged as a general notetaker, it is more expensive than MeetGeek and less generous than Fathom, and the absence of any free plan means you cannot check before committing.
Editorial verdict on each
Fireflies.ai
Category LeaderFireflies is the most capable product in this category and the hardest to price. Nothing else here captures from as many sources, transcribes as many languages, or ships as much adjacent machinery, and Pro at $10 a seat annually is genuinely startling value if your usage fits inside 8,000 minutes. But the twin meters on storage and AI credits, the team-wide 400-minute free pool, and the concentration of the analytics story on Business mean the headline price is not the price. Buy it for multilingual coverage, capture breadth, and one-vendor consolidation across sales, recruiting, and support, and do the usage arithmetic before you sign. Teams who want a small, elegant, unmetered tool will be happier with Granola, and teams who object to bots in customer calls should not shortlist Fireflies at all.
Read the full Fireflies.ai profileSembly AI
Sembly is the product to look at when the meeting record is a professional obligation rather than a convenience. Unlimited transcription on every tier means the bill never moves with your calendar, automatic risk and issue detection speaks the language of programme management rather than of summaries, and consent tracking on the $20 Pro tier is the only built-in answer to two-party consent that anyone in this category ships. Retention settings, custom SSO, audit logs, and HIPAA all available self-serve are more governance than most vendors twice its size will sell you without a contract. The reasons to hesitate are equally concrete: the free option is only a one-hour trial, monthly AI credits expire on Basic and Pro, Basic is a one-person workspace, and the company has raised only about $4.6M. Consultancies, agencies, and project offices should trial it seriously. Everyone else will get more for less from MeetGeek or Granola.
Read the full Sembly AI profileFireflies.ai profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Sembly AI last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in AI Meeting Note Takers
23 trackedAI meeting note takers join calls to record, transcribe, and summarize them, turning conversations into searchable notes, action items, and CRM updates without anyone typing.
The broadest platform in meeting AI: transcription, search, AI apps, and integrations that reach every corner of the small-business stack.
A free plan with unlimited recording and transcription that forced every paid notetaker in the category to justify its price.
A ten-person team out-writing the funded competition on note quality, then automating what the notes say.
Abandoned the meeting bot entirely for a local notepad that finishes what you type, a mechanism the rest of the category is now copying.
A five minute Chrome extension install with no bot to whitelist, and notes open automatically in a post-call tab the moment you hang up.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Fireflies.ai and Sembly AI?
Fireflies is the larger platform with more languages, a much bigger integration catalogue, and conversation intelligence, metered by storage minutes and AI credits. Sembly is unmetered on time, narrower on integrations, and stronger on structured project outputs and consent. Fireflies for breadth; Sembly for professional services process discipline.
Is Fireflies.ai or Sembly AI cheaper?
Fireflies.ai starts at $0 (Free), then $10 per user per month billed annually (Pro; $18 monthly). Sembly AI starts at $10 per month billed annually (Basic, single user), $17 month to month (free trial). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Fireflies.ai pricing model: Per-seat subscription across four tiers, metered on two axes: storage minutes and monthly AI credits. Annual billing is roughly 35 to 45 percent cheaper than monthly. Sembly AI pricing model: Per-seat subscription with unlimited meetings and unlimited transcription on every paid tier.
Does Fireflies.ai or Sembly AI have a free plan?
Fireflies.ai has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited transcription and limited AI summaries, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits, Zoom, Meet, and Teams support, 100-plus language transcription, real-time notes, search, AskFred, and audio or video upload. Trial terms: No fixed trial period published; the free-forever tier is the evaluation path. Sembly AI has no free plan. Trial terms: A $0 Free Trial plan: 1 user, 1 meeting hour, 750 monthly credits plus a 1,750 one-time bonus, 2 months of history.
Who should choose Fireflies.ai?
Multilingual teams and startups that want one vendor covering transcription, conversation intelligence, task routing, and automation across sales, recruiting, and support, and who are willing to model minute and credit consumption rather than buying on the headline price.
Who should choose Sembly AI?
Project management offices, consultancies, agencies, and IT outsourcing firms who need structured meeting records with tasks, risks, and issues detected automatically, plus a documented consent trail, and who do not need a free plan to get started.
What are the best alternatives to Fireflies.ai and Sembly AI?
SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in AI Meeting Note Takers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Fathom (Best Value), Circleback (Momentum), Granola (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
