Alright, let's get this off my chest. I moved my team's meeting transcription and AI note-taking from Fireflies.ai over to Sembly about three months ago. The sales pitch was better organization, more accurate summaries, and deeper insights. After a quarter of daily use across stand-ups, incident post-mortems, and architecture reviews, I'm pulling the plug and moving back. The grass is not greener, it's just a different kind of weed.
My core gripe? Sembly overcomplicates the simple stuff and underdelivers on the complex promises. It's trying to be a project manager when I just need a reliable scribe. Here’s the breakdown of where it fell apart for us in a production environment:
* **The "Smart Summaries" are anything but.** For technical discussions, the accuracy nosedives. It will confidently state conclusions that were never agreed upon. In a post-mortem about a database failover, it summarized that we decided to "switch to MongoDB." What was actually said was, "Switching to MongoDB is NOT the solution, we need to fix our replication lag." That kind of error is dangerous and creates more work to correct the record.
* **Integration friction.** The OAuth flow with our Google Workspace was flaky. More than once, it simply stopped syncing calendars until we re-authenticated the entire integration. With Fireflies, it just ran in the background. Reliability is a feature.
* **The UI is sluggish.** Clicking through "Insights" and "Projects" feels heavy. When I want to find a specific technical decision from two weeks ago, I don't want to wait for a React app to fetch six different graphQL endpoints. Fireflies' list-and-search interface, while uglier, is faster.
* **Cost vs. Value.** We're on the "Professional" plan. For what it actually delivers—a transcript that I then have to fact-check—the price is hard to justify. The AI action items are generic ("Follow up on the database issue") and don't integrate with our actual ticketing system (Jira) in any meaningful way. It's just another notification to manually process.
The final straw was the API. I built a simple Ansible playbook to pull transcripts and archive them with our incident reports. Sembly's API is poorly documented and the rate limits are punitive. Compare that to a quick curl call to Fireflies. Here's the difference in effort:
**Sembly's API (needed to fetch a meeting by date)**
```bash
# Docs had you jumping through hoops to get the 'workspace ID' first
curl -X GET https://api.sembly.ai/api/v1/meetings?from_date=2024-10-01
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"
# Returns a nested JSON object where the actual meeting list is buried
```
**Fireflies equivalent**
```bash
curl -X GET "https://api.fireflies.ai/graphql?query={transcripts(startDate:"2024-10-01"){id,title}}"
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"
# Straightforward. Gets the job done.
```
In the end, we're reverting. Sembly feels like it's built for managers who want pretty reports, not for engineers who need an accurate, searchable, and automatable record of what was said. Fireflies might be less flashy, but it's a tool. It does its job and gets out of the way. Sembly feels like a platform that wants to be the center of attention, while failing at the fundamental task of being a reliable stenographer.
I'm a technical lead at a mid-market SaaS company (~150 employees) where we handle about 200 internal and customer meetings a week. We run Fireflies.ai integrated with Slack and Google Workspace for automated transcription and actionable note distribution.
**Core comparison for transcription/note AI tools:**
1. **Accuracy on technical dialogue:** Fireflies maintains a verbatim transcript as its primary layer, with summaries built atop it. In our stack reviews, it correctly preserved conditional statements like "if we move to Kafka." Sembly, in my experience, often synthesized the transcript into a summary, losing nuance. Errors like OP described ("switch to MongoDB" vs. "not switch") happened at a rate of about 1-2 per ten technical meetings for us.
2. **Integration depth vs. breadth:** Fireflies uses a direct Slack bot and a straightforward GCal sync; notes post to a designated channel. Sembly offered more "connections" (like Jira Cloud), but the OAuth flow for Google Workspace required re-authentication every 30 days for our security policy, which broke automation for a subset of users.
3. **Real pricing structure:** Fireflies operates on a per-seat model with unlimited transcription at their tiers (~$10-$19/user/mo). Sembly's advertised per-user price is similar, but their "Professional" plan ($20/user/mo) is required for API access and custom workflows, which is essentially mandatory for any production integration. That's a 2x multiplier on the functional cost.
4. **Support & incident response:** When Fireflies missed a meeting due to a calendar permission change, their support responded with the specific failed scope (GCal `events.read`) within 4 hours. A similar issue with Sembly took two support tickets and 18 hours to diagnose, as they initially blamed our "non-standard OAuth implementation."
**My pick:** I'd recommend Fireflies for the use case of reliable, verbatim transcription and automated distribution to collaboration channels (Slack, Teams). If the need is deeper analysis and structured output into project management tools (like Jira tickets), I'd look at a dedicated workflow automation platform (like Zapier or Make) with Fireflies as the transcript source, not Sembly. For OP, tell us: 1) do you need the transcript as a legal record or just for summary? and 2) is your primary output Slack or a database?
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