Therapy requires a particular kind of attention. We are listening not only for facts, but for patterns, emotional shifts, protective strategies, changes in risk and the meaning developing between sessions. Documentation matters, yet it should not compete with that presence—or become another hour of work at the end of the day.

Freed and AirNote both aim to reduce this burden. Freed is a polished, widely used clinical scribe with a credible mental health offering and broader tools for medical practices. AirNote takes a more focused approach: it is built specifically around therapists, ongoing therapeutic relationships and the work that happens beyond the formal progress note.

For most solo therapists, AirNote is the stronger overall choice. Its single $19.99 monthly plan includes therapy-specific notes, longitudinal client context, formulations, client documents and session-grounded AI assistance. Freed is capable, but the plan needed for comparable context and practice-support functionality costs substantially more.

Key takeaways

• AirNote costs $19.99 per month. Freed’s Starter plan begins at $39 but is limited to 40 notes monthly, while its unlimited Core plan is listed at $79 per month.

• AirNote costs $708.12 less per year than Freed Core at their displayed monthly prices.

• Freed reserves visit summaries, patient context, letters, referrals, EHR push and its medically informed assistant for Premier, priced at $119 monthly or $104 per month with annual billing.  

• Freed has made a meaningful investment in mental health. It offers speciality templates, custom formats, format learning and integration with EHRs such as SimplePractice. It should not be dismissed as a basic SOAP-note generator.  

• AirNote’s advantage is its underlying therapy workflow: separate Clinical and Process Notes, client linking, Prior Context, therapy formulations, session preparation and therapist-oriented documents.

• Both products take security seriously, but AirNote transcribes audio locally on the therapist’s Mac rather than temporarily uploading it for cloud processing.  

Freed vs AirNote at a glance

What is Freed?

Freed is an established AI medical scribe and clinician assistant. Its website describes a platform used by more than 26,000 clinicians and over 1,300 clinics, with tools spanning documentation, visit preparation, coding, letters, EHR transfer and front-desk operations. It is explicitly positioned for small and midsized practices rather than only large health systems.  

Its core scribe records a clinical conversation and turns it into a structured note. Clinicians can choose speciality-specific templates, build their own formats or edit a note and ask Freed to learn that structure for future encounters. Freed says its templates are developed directly with practising clinicians rather than drawn from an unmoderated community library.  

Freed also has a dedicated mental health product. It supports therapists and counsellors, offers customisable progress notes and patient letters, and can push notes into EHRs such as SimplePractice. Its public materials emphasise control over tone, length, identifiers and session-specific language.  

This is important context: Freed is not simply a generic medical note generator with therapy added as an afterthought. Its mental health functionality is credible.

However, therapy remains one speciality within a much broader platform. Many of Freed’s most distinctive features—medical coding, clinical decision support, EHR push and front-desk automation—are designed for the wider needs of healthcare practices.

What is AirNote?

AirNote is a therapy-specific AI documentation and practice assistant for Mac.

It records and transcribes sessions while the therapist remains focused on the client. When the session ends, it can draft two different forms of documentation:

• A concise Clinical Note for the formal record.

• A fuller Process Note for the therapist’s reflection, formulation, planning and continuity.

AirNote also links sessions to individual clients, develops Prior Context from earlier work, creates therapy-specific documents and formulations, and allows the therapist to explore a session through Ask AirNote.

The public site describes session preparation based on previous sessions and formulations that draw on the client’s work over time. It also supports summaries, homework, referrals, progress letters and absence documents.  

Rather than trying to become an EHR or a general healthcare operations platform, AirNote is designed to work beside the therapist’s existing practice-management system.

Pricing: the starting price does not tell the whole story

Freed advertises plans starting at $39 per month. That is accurate, but its Starter plan is limited to 40 notes per month.  

Averaged across a year, that allowance is approximately nine notes per week. It may suit a clinician with a small caseload, occasional assessment work or a gradual return to practice. A therapist seeing clients most working days, however, is likely to need Freed Core.

Freed Core is listed at $79 per month and adds unlimited note generation, the instant template builder and its AI editing assistant.  

AirNote’s current plan is $19.99 per month.

Over twelve months:

Compared with Freed Core, AirNote saves a therapist $708.12 each year.

The difference becomes larger when we compare broader AI functionality. Freed’s pricing matrix places visit summaries, patient context, letters, referrals, EHR push, medical knowledge and coding in Premier. At $104 per month with annual billing, Premier costs $1,008.12 more per year than AirNote. At its monthly rate, the difference is $1,188.12.  

Freed Premier includes capabilities that AirNote does not attempt to reproduce, particularly medical decision support and direct EHR pushing. For a multidisciplinary clinic, those may justify the expense.

For a therapist primarily seeking notes, client continuity, formulations, homework, summaries and reflective support, the difference is harder to overlook. AirNote provides those therapy-relevant functions within one considerably less expensive plan.

Therapy-specific documentation

Freed offers strong control over formal documentation. A therapist can select a speciality template, build a custom one, specify sections and prompts, or ask Freed to learn from an edited note. Freed can also adjust terminology, including whether the record says “client” or “patient”.  

That flexibility is valuable. Some therapists already have an established DAP, SOAP, BIRP or organisation-specific format and simply want the AI to follow it accurately.

AirNote’s distinction is more fundamental than template customisation.

A formal progress note and a therapist’s fuller clinical reflection do not necessarily belong in the same document. The formal record may need to be concise, factual and proportionate. The therapist may simultaneously need somewhere to preserve emerging formulation, relational dynamics, emotional tone, interventions, tentative hypotheses and ideas for the next session.

AirNote therefore creates separate Clinical Note and Process Note drafts.  

This supports a useful boundary:

The Clinical Note records the session. The Process Note helps the therapist think about the therapy.

A sufficiently detailed custom template in Freed may capture some of the same material. AirNote’s advantage is that the separation is built into the product rather than requiring the therapist to design and manage the distinction themselves.

Templates: both are credible, but their starting points differ

Freed deserves credit for its template system. It says its pre-built templates are developed with practising clinicians, can be edited and shared, and cover more than 20 specialities. Its custom builder offers granular sections and instructions, while Learn Format can turn an edited note into a reusable template.  

AirNote’s library is narrower by design. Its templates are built around therapeutic modalities and common mental health use cases. Therapists can choose a relevant starting point, adapt an existing template or build one from scratch.  

The difference is not that Freed lacks useful mental health templates. It is that Freed’s template system must serve psychiatry, family medicine, paediatrics, emergency care, obstetrics and many other clinical settings alongside therapy.  

With AirNote, therapy is the organising principle. Its defaults are designed around therapeutic work before the therapist changes anything.

That can reduce a quieter form of administration: repeatedly correcting medical phrasing, removing irrelevant sections or reshaping a general clinical note into something that fits psychotherapy.

Client context and continuity across sessions

Therapy is cumulative. The importance of a session often lies in its relationship to what came before.

A client’s response to a boundary may echo an earlier relational pattern. A small behavioural change may represent meaningful progress because of the work required to reach it. Risk, avoidance, trust and emotional regulation are rarely understood adequately from one isolated appointment.

Freed does offer continuity tools. On Premier, its visit preparation feature summarises information from the previous note, including patient history, follow-up items and a condensed account of the last visit. Its mental health materials describe patient summaries and chat before the next session.  

This is useful, and it corrects an outdated impression that Freed only considers the current encounter.

AirNote nevertheless takes a more therapy-specific approach. Sessions are linked to the client, and earlier Process Notes can contribute to Prior Context: a therapist-facing summary of recurring themes, goals, changes over time, formulation ideas and significant continuity points.

AirNote can use this context when preparing later notes and formulations. Its session-preparation tools summarise previous work and suggest areas that may be useful to revisit, while formulations can draw from the client’s wider course of therapy rather than only the last note.  

The therapist still reviews the underlying material. Prior Context is not a source of new clinical facts and should not replace professional judgement.

Its purpose is to help the therapist recover the thread of the work:

Session → reflection → context → preparation → next session.

For ongoing psychotherapy, that workflow may be more useful than a conventional medical visit summary.

Beyond progress notes

Freed has developed into much more than a scribe. Its wider platform can provide patient instructions, referral and exemption letters, visit preparation, coding suggestions, clinical answers and EHR transfer. Its assistant can surface patient details and support medically oriented questions using a knowledge base.  

These are valuable tools for a medical practice. A psychiatric prescriber, multidisciplinary clinic or clinician managing diagnoses, medications, billing codes and onward referrals may benefit from that breadth.

AirNote’s additional AI tools are narrower, but often closer to the everyday needs of a therapist.

Ask AirNote can help the clinician explore themes, revisit what was agreed, develop possible follow-up work, reflect on interventions and begin structuring a formulation. Its answers are grounded in the selected session material and relevant client context rather than presented as independent clinical decisions.  

AirNote can also draft:

• Client session summaries.

• Client homework.

• GP referrals.

• Provider progress letters.

• Work or school absence documents.

• Psychological formulations.

• Custom client or professional documents.

These outputs remain drafts. The therapist decides what is accurate, clinically proportionate and appropriate to share.

AirNote also includes upcoming-session tools, calendar connections, local search, practice analytics and client data-access exports. The value is not simply that it writes more types of text. It reduces several smaller administrative tasks around each session while helping the therapist stay connected to the wider course of therapy.

Privacy: secure cloud processing versus local transcription

Both products present serious privacy and security measures.

Freed states that it is HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified, and able to sign Business Associate Agreements. It encrypts protected health information in transit and at rest, with data stored in the United States.  

Freed temporarily stores audio while the note and quality checks are completed, then automatically deletes it. Notes can be deleted manually or configured for 30-day automatic deletion.  

That is a credible security model for a cloud clinical scribe.

AirNote’s approach begins one step earlier. Session audio is recorded and transcribed locally using on-device processing. Raw audio is not sent to AirNote, OpenAI, AWS or another transcription provider, and it is deleted following successful transcription.  

Clinical records are local by default. When the therapist deliberately requests a note, document, formulation or Ask AirNote response, the relevant text is securely processed through AirNote’s cloud AI workflow. Raw audio is not included. Optional Cloud Sync can store encrypted record snapshots, but raw recordings are excluded.  

The practical distinction is straightforward:

• Freed securely uploads and temporarily processes the recording.

• AirNote performs transcription on the therapist’s Mac, so the recording does not need to be uploaded in the first place.

For many forms of healthcare, either architecture may be acceptable. Therapy recordings contain voice, emotion, pauses, names, intimate experiences and contextual detail that may never appear in the final note. For therapists who wish to minimise where that source material travels, AirNote’s local-first approach is particularly compelling.

Which product is more likely to save a therapist time?

Both products can reduce the time spent writing progress notes. Without an independent head-to-head study, it would be unhelpful to claim that one universally generates a note faster or more accurately.

The more meaningful difference is where each product removes work.

Freed can be especially efficient when the clinician wants a note transferred directly into an EHR, needs medical codes or is producing standardised letters across a clinic.

AirNote supports a wider arc of therapy-specific work:

• Producing the formal note.

• Preserving a therapist-facing reflection.

• Carrying client context into future sessions.

• Preparing for the next appointment.

• Developing formulations.

• Drafting homework and client summaries.

• Creating referral and progress documents.

• Retrieving themes through Ask AirNote.

For a therapist, documentation time is not limited to typing the progress note. It also includes remembering previous work, preparing follow-up material, creating letters and rebuilding the clinical thread after a busy week.

AirNote is designed to reduce that broader burden.

Who should choose Freed?

Freed may be the better choice when you work within a multidisciplinary or medically oriented practice; require direct browser-based EHR transfer; use ICD-10, CPT or E/M workflows regularly; want medical decision-support tools; manage a team that needs shared templates and administration; or need a product that works across a wider variety of devices.

Its mental health offering is capable, and its template customisation is a genuine strength. For therapists embedded within a larger clinic workflow, Freed may fit the surrounding organisation better.

Who should choose AirNote?

AirNote is likely to be the stronger fit when your work is primarily psychotherapy or counselling; you practise independently; you want both Clinical and Process Notes; continuity across sessions is important; you regularly prepare homework, summaries, referrals or formulations; you want session-grounded AI assistance; you prefer raw session audio to remain on your Mac; and you want these features for $19.99 rather than paying for a broader medical platform.

For therapists, AirNote’s appeal is not simply that it costs less. Its functions are connected around the way therapy develops over time.

Final verdict

Freed is an impressive AI medical scribe. It is established, flexible and increasingly capable across the whole clinical workflow. Its dedicated mental health product, clinician-designed templates, custom format learning and EHR support make it a credible choice for therapists—particularly those working in larger or more medically integrated practices.

AirNote is the more focused product.

It treats therapy as its starting point rather than one speciality among many. Separate Clinical and Process Notes reflect the distinction between formal record-keeping and therapeutic reflection. Client linking, Prior Context, formulations and session preparation preserve continuity. Ask AirNote and therapy-specific documents support the practical work surrounding each appointment.

The price difference reinforces that advantage. At $19.99 per month, AirNote costs $708.12 less each year than Freed Core. Therapists comparing AirNote with the broader functionality of Freed Premier can save more than $1,000 annually.

For a clinic that needs coding, direct EHR pushing and broader medical operations, Freed may justify its cost.

For a solo therapist who wants to remain present in the room, finish documentation sooner, prepare more thoughtfully and preserve the thread of the work, AirNote is the more compelling choice in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Is Freed suitable for therapists?

Yes. Freed has a dedicated mental health offering, customisable progress notes, speciality templates, format learning and support for EHRs such as SimplePractice. It also serves numerous medical specialities, so therapy is part of a broader clinical platform.  

How much does Freed cost?

Freed lists Starter at $39 per month with up to 40 notes, Core at $79 per month with unlimited note generation, and Premier at $119 monthly or $104 per month with annual billing. Group pricing is customised.  

How much does AirNote cost?

AirNote costs $19.99 per month following a seven-day trial. Its single plan includes its therapy documentation, client-context, document, formulation and Ask AirNote workflows.

Does Freed provide patient context?

Yes. Visit summaries and patient context are included in Freed Premier. Its visit-preparation tools can summarise patient history, follow-up items and the previous note.  

Does AirNote upload therapy-session recordings?

Not for transcription. AirNote transcribes session audio locally on the therapist’s Mac. Relevant text is sent for secure AI processing only when the therapist triggers a cloud AI feature, and optional Cloud Sync excludes raw audio.  

Which is better for therapy continuity?

Both products provide continuity features, but AirNote is more explicitly structured around longitudinal therapy. It combines client linking, Process Notes, Prior Context, session preparation and formulations across the course of the work.

Prices and publicly described Freed features checked on June 22, 2026. Subscription details may change.