Therapy requires us to listen on several levels at once: to the client’s words, emotional shifts, protective patterns, changes in risk and the meaning developing across sessions. Good documentation supports that work, but it should not compete with our attention—or become another task waiting at the end of an already full day.

Nabla and AirNote both use AI to reduce the burden of clinical documentation. They differ, however, in the kind of practice around which each product is built.

Nabla is a mature ambient AI platform designed for healthcare organisations, EHR-connected workflows and clinicians across more than 55 specialties. Its current website highlights deployment across more than 190 health organisations and use by 100,000 clinicians. AirNote is deliberately narrower: it is designed specifically for therapists, ongoing client relationships and the reflective work surrounding each session.  

For most solo therapists and independent mental health practitioners, AirNote is the more natural overall fit. It combines therapy-specific documentation, separate Clinical and Process Notes, client continuity, formulations, session preparation and local audio transcription in one transparently priced plan.

Nabla remains a strong option for larger organisations, multidisciplinary services and clinicians who need deep EHR integration, medical coding support or a platform that can be deployed across many specialties.

Key takeaways

• AirNote costs $19.99 per month, or $239.88 over twelve months, following a seven-day trial.

• Nabla costs $119 per month, with a free tier allowing 30 sessions per month, and enterprise plans available by speaking to the Nabla sales team.  

• Nabla provides credible mental health documentation, including psychology and psychiatry templates. Its underlying structure remains more medically oriented than AirNote’s therapy-first workflow.  

• AirNote generates a concise Clinical Note and a separate therapist-facing Process Note, allowing the formal record and the clinician’s reflective work to serve different purposes.  

• Nabla is strongest in EHR integration, multilingual documentation, coding and organisational deployment. AirNote is strongest in therapy continuity, psychological formulations, reflective support and therapist-oriented documents.

• Both products take privacy seriously. Nabla says it does not store audio by default. AirNote goes further architecturally by transcribing audio on the therapist’s Mac, so raw session recordings are not sent to a cloud transcription service.  

Nabla vs AirNote at a glance

What is Nabla?

Nabla is one of the most established ambient AI assistants in healthcare.

It can listen to clinical encounters, produce structured notes, support direct dictation and integrate documentation into existing EHR workflows. Its wider platform includes coding suggestions, clinical documentation prompts, patient instructions, referral letters and structured data export. Nabla describes support for more than 55 specialties and over 35 languages, including bilingual encounters.  

The product is clearly designed for scale. Nabla Connect can be embedded within an EHR, while its deeper integrations can retrieve clinical context, export notes into existing templates and populate fields such as diagnoses, instructions and vital signs. Its Epic offering includes schedule synchronisation, chart suggestions and direct note insertion.  

That breadth is a genuine advantage for:

• Hospitals and larger provider organisations.

• Multidisciplinary medical practices.

• Clinicians working across different specialties.

• Services requiring central implementation and governance.

• Organisations that want documentation, coding and EHR workflows in one system.

Nabla also has a credible mental health user base. Its website includes testimonials from psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, and its template library includes dedicated psychology and psychiatry formats. It would therefore be unfair to describe mental health as unsupported.  

The more relevant question for therapists is whether supporting mental health is the same as being designed around therapy.

What is AirNote?

AirNote is a local-first Mac application designed specifically for therapists and other mental health professionals.

It records and transcribes therapy sessions, then prepares two different drafts:

• A concise Clinical Note for the formal client record.

• A fuller Process Note for reflection, continuity, formulation and planning.

AirNote also connects sessions to individual clients, develops Prior Context from previous work, prepares therapists for upcoming sessions, generates psychological formulations and allows clinicians to explore session material through Ask AirNote.  

It can draft client session summaries, homework, GP referrals, provider progress letters, absence documents and custom materials. Notes and documents remain editable and can be copied or exported into the therapist’s existing EHR or practice-management system.  

AirNote is not attempting to become a hospital EHR layer, medical coding platform or organisation-wide healthcare assistant. It is designed around a smaller but more specific question:

What does a therapist need before, during and after an ongoing course of therapy?

Pricing: transparency is now the clearest difference

Historically, Nabla has advertised its scribe service at $119 per month, though they no encourage prospective customers to contact their sales team for pricing.

This reflects Nabla’s increasingly organisational positioning. Custom pricing is common when a product includes implementation, EHR integration, user provisioning, security review and support across a clinical workforce.

For a hospital or healthcare group, that model may be entirely appropriate.

For a solo therapist, it creates uncertainty. Before deciding whether the product fits the practice budget, the clinician may need to establish:

• What happens after the free access period.

• Which features are included for an individual user.

• Whether patient context or integrations require an organisational arrangement.

• What the ongoing monthly or annual commitment will be.

AirNote takes a simpler approach.

Its current plan costs $19.99 per month, following a seven-day free trial. That is $239.88 per year. The plan includes sessions, notes, documents, formulations, Ask AirNote, client linking, upcoming-session tools, practice analytics, custom templates, ICD-10 draft metadata and the Mac desktop app.

For independent therapists who personally pay for supervision, insurance, professional memberships, directories, scheduling software, video platforms, accounting and practice-management tools, predictable pricing matters.

AirNote’s advantage is not only that $19.99 is low. It is that the therapist can see the cost, understand the included workflow and begin without an enterprise purchasing process.

Therapy-specific documentation

Nabla’s templates are flexible and professionally structured.

Its current template list includes SOAP and APSO notes, broad multi-section medical notes, psychiatry templates and a psychology template. The psychology format covers areas such as the presenting complaint, history, mental health background, social history, mental status examination, assessment and plan. Its more detailed psychiatry format also includes medical history, physical examination, investigations, prescriptions and appointments.  

These formats can work well for:

• Psychiatric assessments.

• Medically integrated behavioural health.

• Diagnostic evaluations.

• Medication-management appointments.

• Services where mental health records sit inside a wider medical chart.

For ongoing psychotherapy, however, the centre of gravity can feel different.

A therapy session may involve emotional movement, attachment patterns, avoidance, protective strategies, therapeutic rupture, transference, relational meaning, client strengths and tentative formulation. Some of this belongs in the formal record. Some may be clinically useful to the therapist without being appropriate for a concise progress note.

AirNote is built around that distinction.

Its Clinical Note is intended to support a clear, proportionate formal record. Its Process Note can preserve richer therapist-facing material, including interventions, emotional tone, therapeutic process, formulation themes and ideas for future work.  

This allows the therapist to avoid two common problems:

1. Writing such a brief record that it becomes unhelpful for future continuity.

2. Placing every reflective detail into the formal note simply because there is nowhere else for it to go.

A sufficiently customised Nabla template may capture some of the same information. AirNote’s advantage is that the distinction between record-keeping and reflection is built into the workflow from the beginning.

Templates: medical flexibility versus therapeutic relevance

Nabla offers extensive customisation. Clinicians can select templates, change formatting, provide custom instructions, use dot phrases and regenerate notes with additional directions. Its breadth across specialties is impressive.  

AirNote’s template library is narrower, but that narrowness is intentional.

Its templates are organised around therapeutic approaches and common mental health documentation needs. The therapist can select a modality-focused template, adapt an existing structure or create one from scratch.  

The distinction is not simply the number of templates available.

A therapist evaluating an AI scribe should ask:

• Does the default language sound like therapy?

• Does the structure distinguish observed material from tentative formulation?

• Does it capture therapeutic interventions and client responses?

• Does it avoid unnecessary medical sections?

• Does it produce a useful draft without extensive deletion or reframing?

Nabla can be customised to suit many contexts. AirNote begins closer to the context of therapy.

That can reduce the quieter editing burden that follows AI-generated notes: removing medically oriented headings, correcting assumptions and translating a general clinical document into language that fits psychotherapy.

Client context and continuity across sessions

Therapy is cumulative.

A statement in today’s session may matter because it echoes something said months earlier. A small behavioural change may be significant because of the work that preceded it. A moment of withdrawal may only make sense in relation to an established relational pattern.

Both products can use context, but they approach it differently.

In Nabla’s standalone workflow, the Patient Context field allows the clinician to type or dictate concise information such as the patient’s age, reason for the visit, treatment, medical history or a summary of a previous encounter. That information remains until the clinician manually changes it.  

In integrated organisational deployments, Nabla can retrieve patient history and clinical context directly from the EHR. This is a powerful capability when the EHR is already the longitudinal source of truth.  

Nabla’s standalone help centre also describes a 14-day encounter storage policy. This reinforces the idea that Nabla is primarily designed to generate, review and transfer documentation into another record system rather than serve as a long-term therapy workspace itself.  

AirNote is structured around the client relationship inside the app.

Sessions are linked to individual clients. Earlier Process Notes can contribute to Prior Context, a concise therapist-facing account of recurring themes, goals, changes, formulation ideas and continuity points. AirNote can use relevant previous work when preparing later notes, session-preparation material and formulations.

Its public feature set also includes:

• Pre-session summaries based on previous sessions.

• Suggestions for material that may be useful to revisit.

• Psychological formulations drawing on the client’s work over time.  

The clinician remains responsible for reviewing the source record and deciding what is clinically relevant. Prior Context is not a new source of fact and does not replace professional judgement.

Its value is practical: the therapist can recover the thread of the work without manually reconstructing it before every appointment.

Session → Process Note → Prior Context → preparation → next session.

For ongoing psychotherapy, that is a meaningful difference.

AI support beyond the progress note

Nabla is developing a broad clinical workflow platform.

Its EHR integrations can produce coding suggestions, identify documentation gaps, populate orders, export structured data and provide patient instructions. Its standalone product can also generate letters for referring or consulting professionals and create patient-friendly post-visit information.  

These capabilities are especially useful where the clinician needs to:

• Support medical billing and coding.

• Transfer structured information into an EHR.

• Document orders and diagnoses.

• Prepare post-visit medical instructions.

• Work within a multidisciplinary healthcare service.

AirNote’s additional functions are more specifically aligned with therapy.

Ask AirNote lets the therapist explore the selected session and relevant context. A clinician might use it to review themes, retrieve what was agreed, reflect on interventions, prepare follow-up work or begin organising a formulation. Its answers remain session-grounded drafts rather than independent clinical recommendations.  

AirNote can also prepare:

• Client session summaries.

• Client homework.

• GP referrals.

• Provider progress letters.

• Work or school absence documents.

• Psychological formulations.

• Custom client or professional documents.

The therapist reviews every output and decides what is accurate, proportionate and appropriate to share.

This is where a narrower product can provide more practical value. Nabla offers a broader range of healthcare infrastructure. AirNote concentrates its additional AI functionality on the work therapists commonly do between sessions.

Privacy: two credible but different approaches

Both companies take privacy and healthcare security seriously.

Nabla states that it is HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant, does not use customer data to train its models, and holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. Its service uses encrypted cloud infrastructure, and its public materials state that audio is not stored by default. Clinicians can choose to provide de-identified audio when submitting feedback.  

Nabla’s help centre describes a configurable 14-day retention period for medical data and says deleted encounters cannot be recovered.  

This is a strong security and compliance position, particularly for healthcare organisations with formal procurement requirements.

AirNote’s distinctive privacy advantage is architectural.

Session audio is recorded and transcribed on the therapist’s Mac using on-device processing. Raw audio is not sent to AirNote, OpenAI, AWS, Google or Apple for transcription. Following successful transcription, the raw recording is deleted.  

Clinical records are stored locally by default. When the therapist chooses to generate a note, document, formulation or Ask AirNote response, relevant text is securely sent through AirNote’s AI workflow. Raw audio is not included. Optional Cloud Sync can store server-side-encrypted record snapshots, but raw recordings remain excluded.  

The difference can be summarised simply:

• Nabla: secure healthcare cloud processing, with no audio stored by default.

• AirNote: raw audio transcription occurs on the therapist’s device, so the recording does not need to be sent away for transcription.

A therapy recording contains more than clinical facts. It includes the client’s voice, pauses, emotion, names, personal history and the full texture of a private conversation.

For privacy-conscious therapists, avoiding the transfer of that raw source material may be more reassuring than relying only on promises about storage after processing.

Neither approach removes the therapist’s responsibilities. Clinicians still need appropriate consent, secure devices, suitable retention practices and careful review of every AI-generated output.

Which product is more likely to save a therapist time?

Both products can reduce the time required to produce a clinical note.

Nabla may save the most time in settings where documentation must flow directly into an EHR, coding suggestions are useful and several clinicians need a consistent organisational workflow.

AirNote is designed to remove work across a broader therapy-specific cycle:

• Capturing and transcribing the session.

• Preparing the formal Clinical Note.

• Preserving a therapist-facing Process Note.

• Carrying context into later sessions.

• Preparing for the next appointment.

• Drafting formulations.

• Creating homework, summaries and professional documents.

• Retrieving relevant material through Ask AirNote.

For therapists, administrative burden is rarely confined to typing the progress note. It includes remembering what happened, preparing follow-up material, writing letters and re-establishing the clinical thread across a busy caseload.

AirNote is designed around that wider burden.

Which product is more likely to support quality of care?

No AI scribe can guarantee better therapy. Quality of care depends on the therapist’s competence, judgement, supervision, ethical practice and relationship with the client.

Technology can nevertheless support better conditions for care.

When a therapist spends less of the session watching a screen, there is more room for eye contact, emotional attunement and careful listening. When documentation is completed promptly, the record may be more accurate. When previous themes are easier to retrieve, meaningful continuity may be less likely to disappear beneath a busy week.

Nabla’s scale and integration can create these benefits across large healthcare organisations.

AirNote’s contribution is more intimate and therapy-specific. Its Process Notes, Prior Context, formulations and preparation tools are designed to help the therapist return to the client with a clearer sense of where the work has been and where it may be going.

That does not replace clinical thinking. It creates more space for it.

Who should choose Nabla?

Nabla is likely to be the stronger choice when:

• You work within a hospital, health system or multidisciplinary provider organisation.

• Deep EHR integration is a central requirement.

• Your service needs one tool across many clinical specialties.

• Coding suggestions and documentation-integrity prompts are valuable.

• You regularly work in several languages.

• Central implementation, organisational support and enterprise security review matter.

• Your EHR is already the main longitudinal record and Nabla is being used to create and transfer documentation into it.

Nabla is an accomplished platform. Its adoption, integrations and security credentials make it a serious option for healthcare at scale.

Who should choose AirNote?

AirNote is likely to be the better fit when:

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

• You practise independently or within a small private practice.

• You want separate Clinical Notes and Process Notes.

• You care about preserving continuity across an ongoing therapeutic relationship.

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

• You want an AI assistant grounded in the session and client context.

• You prefer raw therapy audio to remain on your Mac during transcription.

• You want one clearly priced plan at $19.99 per month.

• You want a focused documentation assistant rather than a broad enterprise healthcare platform.

AirNote’s advantage is not simply that it offers fewer medical features. It is that the features it does offer are connected around the rhythm and responsibilities of therapy.

Final verdict

Nabla and AirNote are both credible AI scribes, but they are optimised for different worlds.

Nabla is the more established platform for healthcare organisations. Its EHR integrations, multilingual support, coding capabilities, security certifications and multi-specialty infrastructure make it a compelling option for larger and more medically integrated services.

AirNote is the more focused product for therapists.

It recognises that a formal note and a useful clinical reflection are not always the same document. It links sessions around the client rather than treating each encounter in isolation. It supports formulations, preparation, homework, summaries and therapist-facing questions. Its raw audio transcription remains on the therapist’s Mac.

Its pricing also reflects the economics of independent practice: $19.99 per month, with the core therapy workflow included, rather than an undisclosed sales-led package designed around organisational deployment.

For a large provider group seeking ambient AI across many specialties, Nabla may be the more appropriate investment.

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

Frequently asked questions

Is Nabla designed for therapists?

Nabla supports mental health professionals and includes psychology and psychiatry templates. It is, however, a broad healthcare platform supporting more than 55 specialties rather than a therapy-only product.  

How much does Nabla cost?

Nabla’s current public website does not display a paid individual list price. It offers a free-entry route and directs prospective organisational customers to speak with its team. Historically, Nabla has been priced at $119-per-month.  

How much does AirNote cost?

AirNote costs $19.99 per month following a seven-day free trial. Its single plan includes its therapy notes, documents, formulations, client-linking and Ask AirNote workflows.

Does Nabla have therapy templates?

Yes. Nabla includes psychology and psychiatry formats, alongside SOAP, APSO and numerous medical specialty templates. Its psychology template is structured around history, mental status, assessment and planning.  

Does Nabla retain previous client context?

Nabla allows clinicians to enter Patient Context manually, and integrated organisational deployments can retrieve context from an EHR. Its standalone help centre describes a 14-day encounter retention policy.  

Does Nabla store session audio?

Nabla says audio is not stored by default. A clinician can choose to share de-identified audio when providing feedback.  

Does AirNote upload session audio for transcription?

No. AirNote transcribes raw audio locally on the therapist’s Mac and deletes it after successful transcription. Relevant text is sent for secure AI processing only when the therapist triggers a generation feature.  

Which product is better for EHR integration?

Nabla has the advantage. Its platform is designed for deep integration across EHR systems, including structured exports, contextual retrieval, coding and Epic workflows.  

Which product is better for therapy continuity?

AirNote is more explicitly designed around longitudinal therapy. Client linking, Process Notes, Prior Context, session preparation and multi-session formulations help preserve the thread of the work over time.

Publicly described features and buying routes checked on June 22, 2026. Nabla’s former $119 individual price is not shown on its current website and has therefore not been used as a current price.