Therapy asks us to hold a great deal at once: the client’s words, what remains unspoken, emerging patterns, risk, formulation and the direction of the work. Documentation matters, but it should not pull us away from that presence—or follow us home at the end of every working day.

Both Heidi and AirNote use AI to reduce the burden of clinical documentation. The more useful question for therapists, however, is not simply which product can generate a note. It is which one fits the way therapy develops across sessions, supports thoughtful clinical work and offers good value once the features you actually need are included.

For most solo therapists and small mental health practices, AirNote is the stronger overall fit. It is designed specifically around therapy, includes longitudinal client context and reflective clinical tools, and costs substantially less than Heidi’s paid scribe plan.

Heidi remains a credible option, particularly for clinicians who need a free basic scribe or organisations seeking a broad platform that can be deployed across many medical specialties.

Key takeaways

• AirNote costs $19.99 per month, compared with $80 per month for Heidi’s paid scribe plan. That is a difference of ~$720 per year.

• Heidi’s free plan can be useful for basic transcription, but its limited templates and lack of meaningful client linking restrict its value for ongoing therapy.

• AirNote produces both a formal Clinical Note and a therapist-facing Process Note, supporting record-keeping as well as reflection and continuity.

• Heidi serves a very broad healthcare market. AirNote is built specifically for therapists, with curated templates, client context, formulations, therapy documents and session-grounded AI assistance.

Heidi vs AirNote at a glance

What is Heidi?

Heidi is a broad AI clinical assistant used across many areas of healthcare. Its scribe captures an encounter and converts it into structured clinical documentation. The wider platform also includes clinical evidence tools, patient communication features, coding support and enterprise administration.

Heidi does offer a dedicated mental health page and presents use cases for psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and psychiatrists. It can generate progress notes, assessments and letters, and it is clearly capable of handling mental health consultations.  

At the same time, Heidi’s overall direction is much wider than therapy. Its own scribe materials describe a product for “every clinician, every specialty, every setting,” including physicians, surgeons, critical care teams, nurses, veterinarians and trainees. Its enterprise offering emphasises deployment across more than 200 specialties and multiple hospital departments.  

That breadth is a genuine strength for a multi-specialty organisation. For an individual therapist, however, it can mean that psychotherapy is one workflow among many rather than the organising principle of the product.

What is AirNote?

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

The Mac app records and transcribes sessions while the therapist remains focused on the client. After the session, it can prepare two distinct drafts:

• A Clinical Note for the formal record.

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

This distinction matters. A concise progress note and a useful reflection on the therapeutic process are not necessarily the same document. Combining them can produce a record that is either too sparse to support the clinician or too detailed for its formal purpose.

AirNote allows each to serve its own function.

The product also links sessions to individual clients, develops Prior Context from previous work, generates client-facing documents and formulations, and lets the therapist ask questions about the session through Ask AirNote. It is designed to complement an existing EHR or practice-management system rather than requiring the therapist to replace it.

Pricing: Heidi’s free plan is not the whole comparison

Heidi’s perpetual free plan is appealing. A therapist can begin transcribing sessions without immediately taking on another subscription, which may be useful for occasional use or an initial experiment with AI documentation.

The limitation is that a basic scribe and a useful therapy assistant are not quite the same thing.

Heidi’s pricing matrix distinguishes between standard and advanced templates and shows limitations around Ask Heidi, personalisation, and patient and session linking on its lower tiers.  

For therapists, those restrictions affect the clinical usefulness of the product:

• A small selection of standard templates may push the clinician towards generic or medically oriented note structures.

• Without client linking, each session remains more isolated.

• Context cannot develop naturally across a course of therapy.

• More capable document generation and AI assistance require an upgrade.

Once the comparison moves to Heidi’s $80-per-month scribe plan, the price difference becomes substantial.

Heidi costs $960 over twelve months. AirNote costs $239.88. AirNote therefore saves $720 per year.

AirNote does not use a permanently restricted free tier. Instead, it offers a seven-day trial followed by one $19.99 monthly plan. Client linking, note generation, therapy documents, formulations, custom templates, Ask AirNote and practice-support features sit within that plan rather than being divided across several upgrades.

Therapy-specific templates versus a broad template community

A template is not merely a set of headings. It influences what the AI notices, what it prioritises and how much editing the clinician must do afterwards.

Heidi offers a very large Template Community spanning medicine, dentistry, nursing, allied health, mental health and veterinary care. That breadth can be useful, and there are therapy-related submissions within the library. But many templates are community contributions from individual users across different countries, professions and practice settings. The clinician has to decide whether a particular submission is clinically appropriate, sufficiently complete and compatible with their own professional obligations.  

AirNote takes a more focused approach. Its template library was designed with therapists around recognisable, valuable mental health use cases. Templates are intended to reflect the ways therapists actually document and think, rather than adapting a general medical consultation format to psychotherapy after the fact.

Therapists can select an appropriate starting point, modify an existing template or create their own. The advantage is not simply having more choices. It is having choices that are relevant enough to require less reshaping.

This can make the generated draft feel more like the beginning of your note and less like material that must first be translated into therapeutic language.

Clinical notes and process notes serve different purposes

One of AirNote’s clearest advantages is its separation of Clinical Notes and Process Notes.

The Clinical Note is designed to be concise and appropriate for the formal record. The Process Note can hold a fuller therapist-facing account of interventions, relational dynamics, emotional tone, tentative formulation themes and considerations for future sessions.

From a therapist’s perspective, this reflects the reality of the work. We often need one document that records what happened and another layer of thinking that helps us understand what the session might mean.

AirNote can use previous Process Notes to develop Prior Context: a compact summary of recurring themes, goals, changes over time, formulation ideas and relevant continuity points. When enabled, that context can inform later notes and formulations.

The therapist still reviews the source material and every generated draft. Prior Context is not treated as a source of new facts or a replacement for professional judgement. Its role is to help the clinician recover the thread of the work without rereading every previous note before a session.

Heidi can link patients and sessions on its more capable plans, and its mental health materials refer to surfacing previous notes and assessments.   The important distinction is that AirNote makes longitudinal therapeutic continuity a central workflow, rather than an additional capability within a general clinical platform.

Beyond note generation

The most valuable AI scribe may not be the one that produces a note a few seconds faster. It may be the one that removes several smaller pieces of work around each session.

AirNote can draft:

• Client session summaries.

• Client homework.

• GP referrals.

• Provider progress letters.

• Work or school absence documents.

• Psychological formulations.

• Custom client or provider-facing documents.

Ask AirNote allows the therapist to explore the material associated with a particular session and its relevant context. A clinician might use it to identify themes worth reviewing, retrieve what was agreed for the next appointment, develop possible homework or begin structuring a formulation.

These outputs are drafts, not clinical decisions. Their value lies in helping the therapist organise and revisit the information already available—not in replacing careful assessment, supervision or professional reasoning.

AirNote also includes optional calendar connections, local search, practice analytics, exports and client data-access packs. Together, these features make it more than a transcript-to-note converter. They support the practical work before, between and after sessions.

Heidi also has ambitions beyond documentation. Its broader platform includes evidence search, coding, communications and follow-up workflows.   These may be valuable for doctors making frequent medical decisions or healthcare organisations managing activity across departments.

For many therapists, however, AirNote’s narrower range of additional tools may be more relevant. Formulation, reflective continuity, client homework and session-grounded questions are closely connected to the work of therapy. They are not general healthcare features repackaged for mental health.

Which product is more likely to improve continuity of care?

Neither product can guarantee better care. That depends on the clinician, the therapeutic relationship and how responsibly the technology is used.

A well-designed tool can nevertheless reduce avoidable cognitive and administrative strain.

When each session is linked to the client, previous work can inform the next note and the therapist can quickly recover important themes, agreed actions and changes over time. That makes it less likely that clinically useful threads are lost between appointments—particularly across a busy caseload.

AirNote’s combination of client linking, Process Notes, Prior Context, Ask AirNote and formulations creates a coherent longitudinal workflow:

Session → notes → reflection → context → next session.

This is more clinically meaningful than treating each recording as an isolated encounter.

Heidi’s free plan is weakest in this area because it does not provide the client-linking and continuity features needed to build that longitudinal record. Its paid plans address more of the gap, but at a considerably higher monthly cost.

Privacy and therapist control

Heidi presents a strong healthcare compliance posture and offers the certifications and administrative controls that large organisations often require. This is one reason it may be attractive to enterprise buyers.

AirNote’s distinctive privacy feature is its local-first design. Raw session audio is transcribed on the therapist’s Mac rather than being uploaded to a cloud service for transcription. The audio is deleted following successful transcription under AirNote’s retention workflow.

Clinical records remain local by default. Relevant text is sent for secure AI processing only when the therapist initiates functions such as note generation, document creation, formulation or Ask AirNote. Optional Cloud Sync can be enabled, but raw audio is excluded from it.

That does not remove the therapist’s responsibilities. Consent, device security, record retention and review of generated content still matter. But for clinicians who are understandably cautious about recordings of therapy sessions, local transcription is a meaningful architectural difference.

Who should choose Heidi?

Heidi is likely to be a good fit when:

• You need a permanently free tool for basic transcription and standard notes.

• You work across medical specialties as well as mental health.

• Your organisation wants one platform that can serve many departments.

• Enterprise certifications, central administration and EHR integration are major procurement requirements.

• You want a wider medical evidence or patient-communication platform and are comfortable paying for the appropriate tier.

Heidi is a capable product. Its breadth, free entry point and organisational ambitions explain its appeal.

Who should choose AirNote?

AirNote is likely to be the better fit when:

• Your work is primarily psychotherapy, counselling or psychological treatment.

• You want templates developed for common therapy use cases.

• You need both formal Clinical Notes and therapist-facing Process Notes.

• You want client context to develop across multiple sessions.

• You regularly prepare homework, summaries, referrals, progress letters or formulations.

• You want AI questions grounded in the client and session material.

• Local audio transcription is important to your privacy approach.

• You want the complete therapy workflow at $19.99 per month rather than paying $60 for the more useful paid tier.

For a therapist seeing clients week after week, AirNote’s advantage is not one headline feature. It is the way its features connect around the therapeutic process.

Already using Heidi?

Switching documentation tools can feel daunting when valuable client context has accumulated in the existing system.

AirNote includes a beta Heidi Health import workflow. It imports your clients, with handover summaries, into AirNote, where the summaries are stored as Prior Context on each client. The process is clinician-controlled and includes a preview before the import is confirmed.

This can make moving from Heidi to a more therapy-specific workflow less disruptive.

Final verdict

Heidi and AirNote can both reduce the time spent turning a conversation into clinical documentation.

Heidi is the broader platform. Its free plan provides an accessible starting point, while its paid and enterprise products are increasingly designed to support many professions, specialties, departments and medical workflows.

AirNote is the more focused product. It was designed around therapists, recurring client relationships and the work that happens beyond the formal progress note. Its curated templates, separate Clinical and Process Notes, Prior Context, formulations, client documents and session-grounded AI tools provide a more coherent fit for therapy.

The pricing strengthens that case. At $19.99 per month rather than $60, AirNote costs $720 less each year while including the functionality a therapist is most likely to need.

For a hospital or multi-specialty healthcare organisation, Heidi may be the more natural choice. For a therapist who wants to remain present in sessions, finish documentation sooner and preserve the thread of the work across time, AirNote is the more compelling choice in 2026.

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