Australian Alternative to Watershed and Persefoni...

If you have shortlisted Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Salesforce Net Zero Cloud for an Australian obligation, it is worth checking, before you sign, whether the platform's public documentation covers the questions your auditor is going to ask you.

That is not a criticism of those products. Their public materials focus on global frameworks such as CSRD, PCAF and US climate disclosure, and on multi-country groups.

We could not find public documentation, as at September 2026, showing any of them was designed around the NGER Measurement Determination. That is the gap this post is about.

Everything said about those four platforms below is drawn from their own public materials and from public reporting, and is current as at September 2026. Carbon software moves quickly, so treat each point as a question to put to the vendor rather than a settled fact.

The framework mismatch nobody prices in

AASB S2 is closely aligned with IFRS S2, but not identical. NGER-registered reporters need to submit under the NGER Measurement Determination methods, and the ASRS jurisdictional relief released in December 2025 (AASB S2025-1) means Australian entities can use AR5 GWPs in AASB S2 disclosure for NGER-covered portions without recalculating to AR6. If your carbon platform does not handle Method 1 factors, or what a Safeguard baseline is, or how to handle the state-based electricity Scope 2 split, you are going to end up doing the last mile in a spreadsheet anyway.

That is a pattern we think many reporters want to avoid. Big global platform for the enterprise data model. Consultant spreadsheet for the NGER submission. A third tool for evidence collection. Nobody wants that stack in Year 2.

The other framing worth naming: spend-based emission accounting is the common default in the US and EU market, largely because it is what a large customer can extract from their ERP without a document pipeline. Australian NGER reporters are held to activity-based data (litres of diesel, GJ of gas, kWh of electricity) and assurance pushes hard on data quality. A tool that defaults to spend-based is likely to draw questions in the first assurance walkthrough. See why quantity-based emissions data matters more than spend for the mechanics.

Named comparison, honestly

None of Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Salesforce Net Zero Cloud publishes a public price list. Publicly reported figures as at September 2026 suggest Watershed lands roughly in the US$25K to US$175K per year range (about A$37K to A$264K) and Salesforce Net Zero Cloud broadly in the US$32K to US$140K range (A$48K to A$210K), with Persefoni and Sweep negotiated per customer in the same enterprise band. Actual pricing depends on scope, so confirm directly with each vendor before you budget off these numbers. None of these are wrong prices for what they do. They are wrong prices for a mid-market ASRS Group 2 reporter with three facilities and one sustainability lead.

Where the international platforms win: multi-country consolidation across US SEC, EU CSRD, UK SECR and Singapore, financed emissions modules if you are a bank, and mature audit trails inside their home framework.

Where the public documentation goes quiet on Australian obligations, as at September 2026. Each of these is a demo question, not a settled conclusion:

We could not find NGER Measurement Determination method categories documented as native fields on any of them. Mapping into them looks like the reporter's job.
State-based electricity factors (VIC 0.78, NSW 0.64, TAS 0.20 kg CO2-e per kWh from NGA Factors 2025) as separate rows rather than a national average are not documented publicly. A national blend understates VIC-heavy portfolios and overstates Tasmanian ones, so ask which one you are getting.
Safeguard Mechanism baseline tracking, per-gas breakdown, and the SMC/ACCU interaction are not documented publicly.
ANZSIC industry mapping, which auditors ask for, is not documented publicly.

We built Carbonly around the local list, not the global one.

What your NGER submission gets from the ledger

Carbonly matches activity data to NGA emission factors, and every record stores the emission factor version that was applied, so a submission calculated on NGA 2025 still shows NGA 2025 after NGA 2026 is published. That is the kind of audit trail your assurance provider is going to test.

Period locking and restatement reasons mean a change to a closed period is recorded with its reason rather than silently overwritten. NGER facility and corporate-group threshold status is computed from the ledger. The Safeguard Trajectory Check compares projected emissions with each facility's declining baseline on demand, so a Safeguard facility does not need a separate spreadsheet to see its trajectory.

Carbonly calculates with AR5 GWPs, the set NGER uses. If your AASB S2 disclosure needs AR6 figures, that conversion currently happens outside the platform. The AR5 vs AR6 GWP problem is worth understanding before you choose any tool.

Boral dockets and AGL bills turned into records with the source line attached

The other thing to test is how a platform handles the fact that Australian activity data mostly arrives as PDFs. Boral concrete dockets. Ampol fuel invoices. AGL electricity bills. TfNSW e-tag statements. Some of them are scanned images of a paper docket that a project manager photographed on site. Almost none of them fit a clean CSV import.

What you get is one record per docket with the source line attached, matched to an NGA or EPD factor, with the uncertain ones routed to a reviewer. Carbonly's AI document engine reads 8 file formats: PDF, CSV, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, images, and scanned/image-only PDFs. It runs five-tier material matching to NGA factors or a construction EPD factor library, and low-confidence matches go to a reviewer. The verbatim line text is kept as evidence, so an auditor can see where each number came from.

When a reviewer corrects a match or assigns a material to an unmatched line, the line text is saved as an alias on that material for your organisation only, and later documents with the same wording match through it. Multi-docket invoices become one record per docket, credit lines reduce the total, and fee, hire and dollar-only adjustment lines are skipped. See how AI carbon accounting learns from your supplier invoices for more on alias learning.

The Data Health Agent checks scope and month coverage, incomplete records and stale data. That is the workflow the platform was designed around, against construction document density, where dockets arrive from many suppliers in many layouts across concurrent sites and manual data entry stops being feasible.

Getting documents in

Documents reach the platform through the web UI, email ingestion, and OneDrive and SharePoint folder sync. Suppliers can also submit data through the Supplier Portal, scoped per project, and the Supplier Data Chase Agent follows up on a configured cadence.

Consultants are buyers, not competitors

The platform is not positioned as a replacement for the consultant. It is the workshop equipment; the consultant is the craftsperson doing the materiality assessment, the scenario analysis, the board briefing, and the assurance readiness work.

A consultant can set up a separate workspace for each client. When the client's obligations grow, the workspace grows with them without a re-implementation project. This is the argument in why consultants scale their practice with Carbonly.

Honest limits: where a global platform may fit better

The point of an alternative-to comparison is to be useful when it is right and to say so when it is not. There are cases where Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Salesforce Net Zero Cloud is the better fit.

Full CSRD or ESRS filing with the double-materiality assessment inside the same platform. Carbonly holds the underlying data; a purpose-built CSRD tool renders the ESRS templates end-to-end today, and we do not.
GRESB submission generation for real estate portfolios. We hold the emission data; the GRESB response file is a manual export today.
CBAM importer or exporter reporting for EU-bound iron, steel, aluminium, fertiliser, cement, hydrogen or electricity. We do not have a CBAM module.
Direct integration into Climate Active certification submission or the ISCA IS rating tool. We hold the data; the submission is manual.
New Zealand MfE factor library for the NZ climate-related disclosures regime. We ship NGA 2025. If a large portion of your operations are NZ-based, an ANZ-focused competitor or a global platform with MfE factors will suit you better.
PCAF financed-emissions scoring for a bank's loan book. Persefoni publicly markets a PCAF module; we do not have a PCAF data quality engine.

If your obligations are NGER, AASB S2 (Group 1, 2 or 3), Safeguard Mechanism, Climate Active supporting data, TCFD/GRI/CDP disclosure, and the day-to-day of getting activity data out of Australian suppliers, we built for that. If your primary obligation is CSRD, CBAM or a US SEC filing, one of the international platforms is honestly a better fit.

Pricing that does not lock out mid-market

The other place the global platforms and Carbonly diverge is the shape of the pricing. On the publicly reported figures above, Watershed, Persefoni and Sweep sit in an enterprise annual-contract band. That works for an ASX 100 reporter. It prices out a Group 2 mid-market reporter with three facilities and a Group 3 SME whose customer just asked them for a Scope 3 attestation.

Carbonly is per-project (Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise) with a $100 per month workspace minimum. A Group 3 SME with two projects gets the same platform a large Group 1 reporter would. There is no tier where the AI document engine is gated off, no separate SKU for NGER, and no per-user seat pricing that punishes you for adding an auditor for a fortnight.

Related reading if pricing is what you are evaluating: carbon accounting software pricing in Australia and what the Big 4 quote for AASB S2 assurance vs software.

What a side-by-side pilot looks like

A common question mid-way through a Watershed or Persefoni evaluation is: "we already have the enterprise platform sales cycle running, what does a Carbonly pilot look like in parallel."

The answer is a two-project workspace, two months, one representative facility, one representative supplier for each Scope. Send us three months of your real invoices (fuel dockets, electricity bills, a gas invoice, a couple of Scope 3 supplier statements). We set up the workspace with you. You run the same volume through your incumbent tool or spreadsheet. At the end of the pilot, you compare (a) hours of human time per 1,000 documents, (b) factor accuracy against the NGA 2025 workbook, (c) provenance completeness on a sample audit walkthrough, and (d) how many custom developer hours each side needed to handle your long-tail suppliers.

That is the comparison that matters. Not the vendor deck.

If you want to run that pilot, email hello@carbonly.ai with the two facilities you'd use and the supplier list. A response goes back the same week with a proposed pilot scope.