> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Sembly AI vs Fireflies for Australians 2026: Documents or Just Cheap Notes? - URL: https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/sembly-ai-vs-fireflies-australia-2026/ - Published: 2026-06-24T23:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T06:43:11.000Z - Description: Two capable AI meeting notetakers, two different jobs. Sembly turns calls into finished documents; Fireflies is the cheapest serious notetaker with a genuinely usable free tier. Fireflies scores 18/25, Sembly 16/25 — here's which suits which Australian buyer. - Author: Adam - Tags: Productivity & Workflow, Sembly AI, Fireflies, #comparison Head-to-head verdict [**16**/25Sembly AI](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/review-sembly-ai-australia-2026/)[**18**/25Fireflies.aiWinner](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/fireflies-ai-review-australia-2026/) **Our pick: Fireflies.ai.** The verdict below says who should buy the other. *Pricing figures updated 6 September 2026: USD prices are converted at the current rate (1 USD ≈ 1.40 AUD, verified 5 September 2026) and shown ex-GST, replacing the retired 1.55 + GST basis. A GST-registered Australian business that supplies its ABN is not charged GST on an imported digital service; other buyers should allow \~10% on top (*[*Methodology*](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/methodology/)*).* > **Winner: Fireflies.ai** for most Australian small businesses — at about A$14/month per seat on the annual plan, with a free tier that's genuinely usable, it's the cheapest serious way to stop taking meeting notes. **Pick Sembly AI** if your meetings produce documents: it doesn't just summarise, it drafts the proposal, brief or report that comes *out* of the call. Fireflies scores 18/25, Sembly 16/25, and both score 2/5 on Australian Fit — so neither clears our Australian Fit gate, and neither is a category Top Pick. > > *Last reviewed: 25 June 2026 by Adam.* If you've decided to let a bot take your meeting notes, these are two of the names you'll keep running into. Both join your Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls, transcribe everything, and hand you a searchable summary with action items. Both bill only in US dollars, store your data offshore, and leave recording consent to you. But they're built for different jobs. Fireflies is the cheap, broad notetaker that does the core task well and costs almost nothing to start. Sembly is the step up that tries to write the work that follows the meeting. The decision comes down to what your meetings actually generate. ## At a glance | | Sembly AI | Fireflies.ai | | -------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------- | | **Our score** | 16/25 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (AU Fit 2/5) | 18/25 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (AU Fit 2/5) | | **Entry price (AUD est.)** | \~A$24/mo (US$17, Basic, 1 user) | A$0 (Free tier) | | **Cheapest team plan** | \~A$41/user/mo (US$29, Pro) | \~A$14/seat/mo (US$10, Pro annual) | | **Top tier** | \~A$55/user/mo (US$39, MAX) | \~A$55/seat/mo (US$39, Enterprise) | | **Free plan** | No — trials only | Yes — genuinely usable | | **Standout feature** | Generates documents from calls | Cheapest usable notetaker | | **Platforms** | Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex | Zoom, Teams, Meet | | **Languages** | 48 | English-led | | **Data residency** | US or EU (Azure); AU on Enterprise only, unconfirmed | US default; EU on Enterprise only | | **Billing** | USD only | USD only | | **GST/ABN invoice** | Not documented | Not documented | | **Top Pick eligible?** | No (AU Fit 2/5 — Australian Fit gate) | No (AU Fit 2/5 — Australian Fit gate) | ## What both tools actually do Both are meeting assistants built on the same basic loop. You connect your calendar, a bot joins your scheduled calls, records and transcribes them with speaker labels, and afterwards you get a summary, extracted action items and a searchable transcript library. Both push that data into the tools you already use, and both work fully from Australia with no regional lockout. The split is what each one adds on top. **Fireflies.ai** leans into breadth and price. Its Notetaker bot — visible in the participant list, emailing from fred@fireflies.ai — auto-joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls. You get transcription that's unlimited on every plan including Free, AI summaries and action items, talk-time analytics for sales coaching, and search across your whole library. Its defining trait is value: Pro is US$10/seat/month on the annual plan, and the free tier is good enough to run properly before you pay a cent. The catch is that the smartest AI features run on a monthly credit allowance rather than unlimited use. **Sembly AI** is the step up. Its agent — "Semblian" — joins Zoom, Teams, Meet and Webex, transcribes across 48 languages, and then does the thing that sets it apart: it turns a recorded conversation into a finished document. Run a discovery call, then ask Sembly to draft a project brief, proposal or gap analysis, and you get a structured first draft rather than a wall of quotes. It tracks decisions, assigns action-item owners and deadlines, and pushes into Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Slack and 50-odd other tools. The trade-off: there's no free plan, the cheapest tier is a single seat, and the headline document feature is rationed on lower tiers. In short: Fireflies hands you a tidy summary for almost nothing; Sembly tries to hand you the first draft of the work the meeting created. What you do for a living decides which is worth paying for. ## Pricing in Australia Neither tool bills in Australian dollars, and neither documents GST or an ABN tax invoice on its own pages. Both charge in USD, so expect the exchange rate plus, usually, a bank foreign-transaction fee. We convert at roughly 1.40, shown ex-GST; treat every AUD figure as a planning estimate, not a quote. **Fireflies** opens at free — and the free tier is genuinely usable, with unlimited transcription, 800 minutes of storage per seat and the Chrome extension. Paid plans run Pro at US$10/seat/month annually (about A$14), Business at US$19/seat/month annually (about A$27) and Enterprise at US$39/seat/month (about A$55), annual only. That Pro rate is the cheapest serious entry in the category, and the climb is gentle. The asterisk is the AI-credit allowance — 20 credits on Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise — so a heavy user should check the cap against real call volume. **Sembly** has no free plan, only trials. Basic is US$17/month (about A$24) for a single user with unlimited meetings, transcription and summaries. Pro is US$29/user/month (about A$41) and unlocks the AI documents, analytics and integrations — but caps you at five AI-generated documents and five AI insights, so the headline feature is rationed unless you climb. MAX is US$39/user/month (about A$55) for HD video, HIPAA, SSO and audit log. Annual billing cuts roughly 30% off. Note that Sembly restructured its plans on 1 March 2026; legacy subscribers can continue through December 2026 before migration. The honest read: Fireflies is dramatically cheaper to start — free against Sembly's single-seat A$24 Basic — and stays cheaper seat-for-seat (A$14 Pro against A$41 Pro). But you're not buying the same thing. Sembly's Pro price buys the document generation Fireflies simply doesn't have. If all you need is notes, Fireflies wins on price by a street. If you need the write-up done, Sembly's premium can pay for itself in saved hours. ## Where Sembly AI wins - **Turns talk into documents, not just notes.** The proposal, brief and report generation is the real differentiator — Sembly hands you a structured first draft, not a bullet recap. For a consultant or agency, that's the blank-page problem solved. - **Stronger action-item and decision tracking.** Owners, deadlines and decisions are extracted cleanly, so nothing agreed in the meeting quietly evaporates. - **Wider platform and language coverage.** Adds Webex to the usual three, and transcribes across 48 languages — useful if your meetings aren't all in English. - **A real EU data-residency option at signup.** US or EU hosting is selectable when you start, where Fireflies keeps EU storage locked to Enterprise (and still processes in the US). - **Serious certifications.** SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, PCI DSS and EU-US DPF — a strong security posture for a tool this size. ## Where Fireflies wins - **The cheapest way in, by far.** A genuinely usable free tier and a US$10/seat Pro plan make it the lowest-friction notetaker in the category — ideal for a small team that just wants the notes done. - **Unlimited transcription on every plan.** You're capped on storage, not minutes, even on Free — so you can trial it on real meetings before paying. - **A 0-day no-training policy.** Fireflies states it doesn't use your meeting data to train AI models by default — a genuine privacy plus that Sembly doesn't match on its self-serve plans. - **A gentler, more transparent price curve.** Free to A$14 to A$27 is far less jarring than committing to a paid tool sight-unseen, and there's no per-seat document rationing to navigate. - **A slightly better overall score.** At 18/25 against Sembly's 16/25, Fireflies edges it on value and reliability for the typical Australian buyer who mainly wants clean, searchable notes. ## Which to pick — decision framework - **Your meetings produce documents — proposals, briefs, reports** → **Sembly**. The agentic layer hands you a first draft, which is the whole reason to pay more than Fireflies charges. - **You just want clean, searchable notes for the least money** → **Fireflies**. The free tier and A$14 Pro plan are unbeatable for the core job. - **More than one person needs it on a tight budget** → **Fireflies**. Per-seat Pro at about A$14 stays affordable as the team grows; Sembly's Pro is roughly A$41 a seat. - **You want to trial properly before paying** → **Fireflies**. The free tier runs on real meetings; Sembly offers trials only. - **You're in a regulated field (legal, finance, health) wanting onshore data** → neither clears it off the shelf. Sembly's top Enterprise tier advertises storage "in a region of your choice" but doesn't list Australia — confirm onshore availability with sales before relying on it. - **You record across multiple languages** → **Sembly**, with 48-language transcription. ## The verdict **Winner: Fireflies.ai, for the typical Australian small business that just wants the notes done.** It scores 18/25 to Sembly's 16/25, and for the core job — a bot that joins your calls, transcribes them and gives you a searchable summary — it's cheaper, broader and lower-commitment than anything else here. Start free, move to Pro at about A$14/seat when you're sure, and you've solved meeting notes for a budget line most businesses won't even notice. **But Sembly AI is the better tool if your meetings generate work.** The document generation is a genuine differentiator: hand it a discovery call and get back a project-brief draft instead of a transcript to mine. For a consultant, agency or sales team where each meeting spawns a write-up, that's where the real time saving sits, and it justifies the higher per-seat price the way a plain notetaker never could. The shared caveat matters as much as the choice. Both bill in USD with no documented GST or ABN invoice, both store your data offshore, and both leave Australian recording consent — all-party in Victoria, WA, the ACT, NT, Tasmania and SA — entirely to you. That's why both land at 2/5 on Australian Fit. Under our **Australian Fit gate**, a five-star rating and a category Top Pick both require an Australian Fit of at least 4/5, so neither of these can be our category Top Pick, and the local champion this category needs still doesn't exist. Two very good tools, separated not by quality but by what you need them to do. *This comparison is general information, not professional advice. If you're in legal, finance or health and recording client conversations, confirm your data-handling and recording-consent obligations with someone qualified before committing.* Update history - **24 Sep 2026** — **The AUD column was never grossed up for GST, and every word around it said it was.** The header read *“gross-up; GST unconfirmed”* and the note beneath described a 10% uplift — while the figures themselves are plain conversions at 1.4045\. Checked before changing a word: across the 63 files carrying this wording, **141 rows convert at 1.4045 and none at 1.4045 × 1.10**. **No figure changed here; only the description of them did.** Two things were wrong beyond the arithmetic: *gross-up* names a tax uplift and was being used for a currency conversion, and *GST unconfirmed* is stale — our GST rule settled it on 5 September 2026, and a GST-registered Australian business supplying its ABN is **not charged GST** on an imported digital service. **No USD price moved and no score changed.** `reviewed:` untouched per our dating rule. ## Frequently asked questions ### Are Sembly AI and Fireflies available in Australia? Yes — both work fully from Australia, joining Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls (Sembly adds Webex). Neither has an Australian office or local phone support, and on both, hands-on human account management is reserved for the top tier. ### Which is cheaper, Sembly or Fireflies? Fireflies, clearly. It has a genuinely usable free tier and a Pro plan at US$10/seat/month annually (about A$14), against Sembly's single-seat Basic at US$17/month (about A$24) and team Pro at US$29/user/month (about A$41). But Sembly's price buys document generation Fireflies doesn't offer. ### Do either of them charge in AUD? No. Both price in US dollars only, and neither documents GST or an ABN tax invoice on its own pages. Your card is charged in USD and your bank may add a foreign-transaction fee, so check the tax treatment at checkout before relying on a GST input-tax credit. ### Where does each store my data? Sembly hosts on Azure in the US or EU, selectable at signup, with Australian hosting only on its top Enterprise tier and not explicitly listed. Fireflies stores and processes data in the US by default, with EU storage available only on Enterprise (and processing still in the US). Neither offers standard onshore Australian hosting. ### Which is better for Australians? Fireflies scores 18/25 and Sembly 16/25, but both sit at Australian Fit 2/5 — USD billing, no GST clarity and no onshore data region drag them both down. Under our Australian Fit gate, neither can be the category Top Pick. Pick Fireflies for cheap, capable notes; pick Sembly if your meetings produce documents. ## Read next - Full reviews: [Sembly AI](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/review-sembly-ai-australia-2026/) (16/25) and [Fireflies.ai](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/fireflies-ai-review-australia-2026/) (18/25) - Category guide: [Best AI Meeting Notetakers in Australia 2026](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/best-ai-meeting-notetakers-australia-2026/) - How we score: [Methodology](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/methodology/) ## Sources This comparison draws on The AI Directory Australia's underlying reviews of [Sembly AI](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/review-sembly-ai-australia-2026/) (16/25, AU Fit 2/5, verified 20 June 2026) and [Fireflies.ai](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/fireflies-ai-review-australia-2026/) (18/25, AU Fit 2/5, verified 3 June 2026), each scored against our five-criteria framework and checked against the vendors' own pricing, security and help pages. USD figures are carried from those verified reviews; AUD figures are our own conversion at roughly 1.40, shown ex-GST. Star ratings and Top Pick eligibility follow our [Australian Fit gate](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/methodology/). Wayback Machine snapshots queued. --- *The AI Directory Australia is an independent editorial publication. Read our* [*Methodology*](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/methodology/) *and* [*Affiliate Disclosure*](https://www.theaidirectory.com.au/affiliate-disclosure/)*.* *Synthesised from The AI Directory's verified Sembly AI (20 June 2026) and Fireflies.ai (3 June 2026) reviews. Both tools bill in USD with no documented GST or ABN invoice — confirm live pricing and tax treatment before purchase.*