I used Sembly AI as an AI meeting assistant for about a month, mostly for my team's weekly calls and client check-ins.
Long story short: the real-time transcription and detailed conversation analytics are decent, but the best transcription quality is reserved for the most expensive paid plans. Generally, I felt like Sembly AI was constantly trying to funnel me towards the Team and Enterprise plans.
I was also unhappy with the various monthly limits and the fact that the platform uses my conversations to train its AI models, even on paid plans. This made me hesitant to organize meetings with Sembly AI.
Luckily, I've also tested 20+ other tools with similar features, including meeting insights and collaboration features. Here are 9 Sembly AI alternatives I'd recommend sooner.
TL;DR
- Sembly AI alternatives are worth exploring if you're dealing with bot-only recording, buggy call capture, limited language support, or rigid meeting templates that only make sense for software companies.
- Bluedot is the best Sembly AI alternative, offering bot-free recording via a Chrome extension, accurate transcription in 100+ languages, and Salesforce and HubSpot integrations — without the reliability issues that follow Sembly around.
- Circleback AI is a solid pick for hybrid teams, with bot-free desktop recording and the ability to separate multiple speakers sharing a single device.
- Claap is best suited for sales teams that want async video collaboration alongside their meeting notes, with CRM auto-complete, AI follow-up emails, and a direct lemlist integration.
- Fathom offers one of the more generous free tiers — unlimited recordings and CRM syncing at no cost — though the desktop-only requirement and limited language support are real constraints.
- Fireflies stands out for language coverage (100+ languages) and its AskFred AI assistant, but the credit-based pricing for advanced features runs out faster than most users expect.
- Gong is in a different category entirely — a full revenue intelligence platform with enterprise-grade deal tracking and pipeline analytics, but pricing is opaque and implementation takes time.
- Krisp is the right choice if audio quality is the core problem, with best-in-class noise cancellation and bot-free recording, though it's heavy on system resources and only supports 16 languages.
- Leexi AI is the go-to for European teams with strict data governance requirements, offering ISO 27001 certification and local EU data storage alongside 100+ language support.
- Notta's bilingual transcription — capturing mixed-language conversations in a single transcript — sets it apart for multilingual teams, though the billing practices and accuracy gaps with some languages are worth knowing about upfront.
Why You Need a Sembly AI Alternative
Here are all the reasons I was dissatisfied with Sembly AI:
- Recording Bugs: The AI meeting assistant can be unreliable, sometimes failing to record virtual meetings entirely or capturing only a single sentence from an hour-long call. It occasionally disconnects from my calendar or fails to detect scheduled meetings.
- Slow Processing: Sembly AI takes a long time to process uploaded recordings, especially for longer meetings.
- Wrong Speaker Identification: Sembly's artificial intelligence often attributes dialogue to the wrong speaker, so I could never rely on it fully and had to spend a lot of time double-checking the transcript.
- Limited Multilingual Support: While Sembly accurately transcribes a few languages (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Japanese), its other supported languages are still in beta and suffer from inaccurate transcriptions, particularly on the free plan. Overall, Sembly AI only supports 45 languages, while competitors like Bluedot work with 100+
- Bot-Only Recording: Sembly uses a meeting bot to record meetings, and there's no bot-free recording option even on paid plans. For sales teams and customer-facing personnel, this is an obvious issue since the presence of a bot puts clients off.
- Various Limits: Depending on the plan, audio uploads can be strictly limited (e.g., restricted to 5 hours). There's also a 500 MB cap per recording on lower tiers. And you can only have multiple users on the Team plan or above. The same goes for the AI chatbot that covers multiple meetings. Most importantly, you only get 12 months of storage — except on the Enterprise plan.
- Rigid Meeting Notes: The preset meeting templates mostly cover software companies, so I didn't find it useful for other types of businesses.
- Useless Meeting Analytics: Some of Sembly's analytics are impractical, and the "Time Saved" metric is more like a promotional tool for Sembly than a piece of real business data.
- Poor Customer Service: Users have reported that customer support can be slow, sometimes taking 2 to 3 days to respond to inquiries. Others have cited bad support experiences regarding billing, where Sembly was unable to resolve invoice issues.
Top 9 AI Meeting Assistants — Alternatives to Sembly AI
My top Sembly AI alternatives are:
- Bluedot
- Circleback
- Claap
- Fathom
- Fireflies.ai
- Gong
- Krisp
- Leexi
- Notta
#1. Bluedot
Bluedot is an AI meeting assistant that offers bot-free recording through a Chrome extension, providing discreet meeting notes and real-time transcriptions without disturbing others on the call.
It offers real-time, highly accurate transcriptions and AI-generated meeting summaries in over 100 languages. You can customize the AI notes using built-in or custom templates tailored for specific scenarios, such as sales calls or HR interviews.
Additionally, Bluedot captures speaker analytics for maximum meeting efficiency, detailing talk patterns and monologues, and an AI chat you can use to get insights on past meetings. Finally, it seamlessly syncs action items and summaries with major CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.
Bluedot pricing
- Free plan: $0 (5 meetings lifetime, 1-hour recording limit).
- Basic paid plan: $18/user/month (Unlimited audio-only meetings, 1-hour limit).
- Pro: $25/user/month (Unlimited video meetings, unlimited duration, custom templates).
- Business: $39/user/month (Unlimited imports, Salesforce and HubSpot integrations).
- Enterprise: Custom pricing (SSO, advanced data controls).
Bluedot vs. Sembly AI
Sembly AI joins calls as a visible bot, which can make meetings feel stiff or formal, and its recording is often unreliable.
On the other hand, Bluedot's bot-free recording ensures meetings feel normal for everyone involved. There's no monthly cap on recording length either — advanced plans cover unlimited video recordings and file imports. And if you have any questions or issues, Bluedot's support team tends to respond quickly — a great contrast to the slow support users often experience with Sembly AI. Speaker identification is also more dependable, and real-time transcriptions hold up well across more than 100 languages.
#2. Circleback AI
Circleback AI is another AI meeting assistant that offers bot-free recording through its desktop app, compatible with Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. More uniquely, it supports automatic voice identification that separates multiple speakers sharing a single device — useful for hybrid meetings.
It offers an advanced Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing users to connect external AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor directly to their meeting data. While interesting, this wasn't too useful to me — I could just as easily copy and paste my meeting highlights into any chatbot.
However, Circleback does have robust integrations with unique platforms like Attio and Zoho CRM.
Read More: Circleback AI Alternatives
Circleback AI pricing
- Individual: $25/month (or $20.83/month billed yearly) for unlimited meetings, action items, AI search, and bot-free recording.
- Team: $30/user/month (or $25/user/month billed yearly) for shared team meetings, meeting highlights, and team automations.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for priority support and advanced security controls.
Circleback AI vs. Sembly AI
For me, Circleback AI is one of the top Sembly AI alternatives for note-taking because its desktop app allows for completely bot-free recording.
Sembly frequently suffers from poor speaker identification, whereas Circleback can label multiple distinct voices even if they speak from the same device. Additionally, Circleback supports more audio and video formats and offers unlimited meetings on all paid plans.
#3. Claap
Claap isn't an AI meeting assistant in the traditional sense. It's built around async video — the idea being that most meetings could be a screen recording instead. Record a walkthrough, send it, and teammates can drop timestamped annotations and comments directly on the video. For teams spread across time zones, that's a decent workflow boost.
Also, Claap wants to be your next revenue intelligence tool. CRM auto-complete, AI-generated follow-up emails, deal insights, a direct integration with lemlist — these are all features aimed squarely at sales teams. The only problem is that I doubt anyone would ditch HubSpot or Salesforce for Claap's built-in deal intelligence.
Claap pricing
- Basic plan: €0/month (10 videos/user, 300 recording minutes).
- Pro (1st paid plan): €30/month or €24/month billed yearly (unlimited recordings, 1000 minutes/month, AI video editing).
- Business: €60/month or €48/month billed yearly (unlimited time, CRM auto-complete, AI coaching).
- Enterprise: Custom pricing (SSO, advanced security).
Claap vs. Sembly AI
Claap offers bot-free recording with Google Meet and similar video conferencing platforms, which is one huge benefit over Sembly AI right out of the gate. And Claap provides more customizable templates and project management tools. Whether that's enough to outweigh whatever's keeping teams on Sembly is a different question, but the contrast is noticeable.
#4. Fathom
Fathom is a meeting transcription tool whose main draw is the free plan — unlimited recordings, transcripts, and real-time summaries at no cost. For smaller teams or individuals who don't want to justify a per-seat subscription to finance, that's meaningful. Automated CRM syncing with Salesforce and HubSpot is built in, as is automatic speaker labeling, which saves the manual cleanup you'd have to do with most real-time transcription tools.
There are some tradeoffs that might point you towards Fathom alternatives, though. Fathom requires a desktop app with no mobile support, which is a hard stop for anyone who takes calls on the go or in person. Language coverage sits somewhere between 25 and 38 languages — not terrible, but not close to the top options on the market. The UI has drawn consistent complaints too: light grey text on dark backgrounds, clunky transcript editing, and a support setup that's email-only. None of these is a dealbreaker on its own, but they add up.
Fathom pricing
- Free plan: $0/month for unlimited meetings, transcripts, and real-time summaries from Google Meet and similar platforms.
- Premium: $16–$20/user/month for automated CRM syncs, searchable insights, and team folders.
- Team: $14–$18/user/month (min. 2 users) for collaboration tools and meeting analytics.
- Business: $20–$28/user/month for advanced reporting and enterprise-grade integrations.
Fathom vs. Sembly AI
Fathom's recordings and note-taking are dependable, there are no upload caps, and meeting length isn't something you have to think about — unlike with Sembly AI.
Where Sembly leans heavily into software company workflows, Fathom's AI summaries are more general-purpose — the tool adapts to different client meeting types, across a wider range of industries. That said, Fathom has its own problems. No mobile app, a UI that takes some getting used to, and limited language support mean it's not a universal upgrade.
#5. Fireflies.ai
Fireflies has a few basic features that do stand out. Sentiment analysis is baked in deep, tracking engagement and mood across a call. For sales teams running a lot of discovery or demo calls, that kind of data has obvious uses. Language support covers 100-plus languages, which puts it ahead of most competitors on that front alone.
The downsides that Fireflies alternatives don't have are harder to ignore, though. Advanced AI features run on a credit system that burns through fast — and topping up isn't cheap. Transcription accuracy drops noticeably with heavy accents or overlapping speakers, which is exactly when accurate transcription matters most.
Plus, Fireflies has a pattern of sending automated emails to meeting participants without much warning, which has caused friction for users whose clients suddenly start receiving marketing emails they never signed up for.
Fireflies pricing
- Free plan: $0/month for basic real-time transcription and note-taking from Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, manual uploads, and 800 minutes of storage.
- Pro: $10/user/month (billed annually) for 8,000 minutes of storage, sentiment analysis, AI summaries, and integrations.
- Business: $19/user/month (billed annually) for unlimited storage, video recording, and conversation intelligence.
- Enterprise: $39/user/month (billed annually) for advanced security, HIPAA compliance, and custom data retention.
Fireflies vs. Sembly AI
Sembly's upload restrictions on paid plans are one of its more concrete limitations — MP3 only, with capped upload hours. Fireflies accepts MP4, WAV, and M4A files and doesn't impose the same storage ceiling on Business plans.
On language support, Sembly officially supports a handful of languages, with others still in beta; Fireflies covers 100-plus with consistent accuracy across most of them.
#6. Gong
Gong isn't really in the same category as most competing meeting tools. It's another piece of software trying to be your all-around project management tool and revenue intelligence platform for B2B sales teams. Where other tools transcribe calls and maybe pull out action items, Gong deploys AI agents that track pipeline risk, predict deal closures, and analyze conversations against specific sales methodologies. CRM updates happen automatically: deal stages, contact records, the whole paper trail.
However, the costs — financial and operational — are significant. Pricing is enterprise-tier and notoriously opaque; you're not finding a number on their website.
The interface has a reputation for being cluttered, and the Engage module in particular gets flagged for bugs with some regularity. There's a real learning curve before the platform starts paying off, and support response times are slow.
Gong pricing
- No Public Pricing: Gong requires submitting company details for a custom quote.
- No Free Plan: It is a purely premium, paid note-taking platform.
- High Minimums: Anecdotal reports indicate a base platform fee of around $5,000 plus roughly $1,200–$1,400 per user annually, or a $9,500 minimum for three seats.
Gong vs. Sembly AI
Gong doesn't have many of Sembly's issues. Recording is enterprise-grade reliable, sales call recording is accurate, and there are no upload format restrictions boxing you in.
That said, the gap cuts both ways. Gong is expensive, complex, and takes time to implement properly — it's not a Sembly replacement for a small team that just needs cleaner meeting notes.
#7. Krisp
Krisp carved out its niche by doing one thing exceptionally well — audio. With real-time noise cancellation, echo suppression, and background voice filtering. If you've ever taken a call from a coffee shop or a home office with a toddler nearby, you know exactly why that matters. The live accent conversion feature is also less common and genuinely useful for global teams where a lot of different accents are in the mix.
There are performance issues that make Krisp alternatives more attractive, though. Krisp is CPU and RAM-hungry, making older or mid-range laptops audibly struggle — fan spin-up, heat, lag during the call itself. There's also a known "silence bug" that can distort audio rather than clean it, and transcription failures aren't rare enough to ignore. Only 16 languages are supported, and there's no web-based recording.
Krisp pricing
- Free Trial: $0 for 7 days with unlimited transcription, note-taking, and recording.
- Pro: $8/user/month (annually) for 5GB storage, AI chat, and 60 minutes/day of accent conversion.
- Business: $15/user/month (annually) for 30GB storage, SSO, CRM integrations, and 4 hours/day of accent conversion.
- Enterprise/CC Core: Custom pricing or $10/agent/month for advanced security and contact center tools.
Krisp vs. Sembly AI
Sembly's bot is one of its more consistently criticized features — intrusive, occasionally buggy, and prone to mid-call failures. Krisp records without a bot entirely, through desktop and mobile apps, which removes that specific failure from the equation.
The audio quality gap is the other meaningful difference. Sembly's transcription accuracy suffers when background noise is involved; Krisp's noise cancellation handles that at the hardware level before transcription even starts.
Where Krisp falls short — limited languages, performance issues, no web recorder — are different problems than the ones Sembly has.
#8. Leexi AI
Leexi's main differentiator isn't a flashy AI feature — it's enterprise-grade security infrastructure. The platform boasts GDPR compliance, ISO 27001 certification, and European data storage. For teams operating under strict data governance requirements, that's often the deciding factor.
Searchable transcripts and automated meeting notes work in 100-plus languages, there's a mobile app for in-person meetings, and the platform has templates for different roles — sales workflows, recruiting pipelines, and general notetaking.
The steep pricing is definitely an issue you won't have with all Leexi alternatives, though. CRM integrations and VOIP features are locked behind the Business plan, which means the Starter tier is missing some of the platform's most crucial selling points. Storage is only retained for 6 months on Starter — a hard wall for anyone trying to scale.
Leexi AI pricing
- Starter: €15/user/month (or €12 yearly) for 100+ languages, AI summaries, and 6 months of storage (max 5 licenses).
- AI-Meeting: €29/user/month (or €23 yearly) for custom prompts, end-to-end encryption, AI chat, and 2-year storage.
- Business: €49/user/month (or €39 yearly) for CRM/VOIP integration, enterprise-grade security and field auto-completion.
Leexi AI vs. Sembly AI
Leexi AI remedies Sembly AI’s most glaring reliability shortcomings. While Sembly is plagued by buggy recording failures, Leexi AI provides reliable meeting capture and AI summaries across 100+ languages. The latter platform also offers enterprise-grade ISO 27001 security and local European data hosting.
#9. Notta
Notta has bilingual transcription as the feature that genuinely sets it apart — mixed-language conversations captured in a single transcript, without manually splitting or labeling which language is which. For teams that need multilingual support, that's a meaningful time saver. Automatic translation into 40-plus languages layers on top of that, and the platform works across web and mobile with support for live audio, uploaded files, and YouTube imports.
The billing complaints for this call transcription software are worth paying attention to, though. Users have flagged the "3-day free trial" as misleading — cards getting charged earlier than expected, with support that isn't always quick to sort it out. Transcription accuracy drops with technical jargon and has documented struggles with Spanish specifically, which is a notable gap for a tool leaning into multi-language support capability. Screen recording is also paywalled behind higher tiers.
Notta pricing
- Free plan: $0/month (120 transcription minutes/month, max 3 minutes/conversation, notes on key moments).
- Pro: ~$13.49/month or $8.17/month annually (1,800 minutes/month, up to 5 hours per recording).
- Business: ~$27.99/month or $16.67/month annually (Unlimited transcription, screen recording, admin controls).
- Enterprise: Custom pricing (SAML SSO, audit logs, priority support).
Notta vs. Sembly AI
Sembly's capped at five hours, and Zoom recordings in MP4 format require manual conversion before they can even be imported. Notta is an AI meeting assistant that handles audio, video, and YouTube formats and produces AI summaries without those issues. The five-hour cap disappears, too. For teams dealing with high call volume or varied recording sources, that's a concrete operational difference.
And where Sembly's templates are built around software company workflows with limited flexibility, Notta offers setups for consulting, sales and education, as well as other use cases.
