Compare
Scriben, next to the alternatives
If you are looking at Scriben you are almost certainly looking at Plaud, Limitless, Pocket or Granola too. Rather than let a review site decide what the differences are, here is our own account of them, with every competitor figure taken from that company’s own published pages and dated so you can check it went stale.
How to read these
The rules we wrote them under.
01 / Their numbers come from them
Every price, battery figure and plan limit on these pages is taken from the competitor’s own site or store, never from a review, a roundup or a rival’s blog post about them. Each page carries the date it was checked, because these change.
02 / Every page says what they do better first
Before the comparison table, each page has a section on what the other product does better than Scriben, and it is a real one. Plaud records longer than we do. Granola is excellent on video calls. Pocket makes mind maps we do not make. If that is the thing that decides it for you, we would rather you found out here.
03 / No scores, no percentages
We publish no comparative accuracy score against a named competitor. Our benchmark baselines are not public, so a number like that would not be checkable, and an uncheckable number in a comparison is just marketing with a decimal point in it.
The pages
Four comparisons, and a switching guide.
Two other recorders, one wearable, and the meeting-notes software most people try first.
- Scriben vs Plaud Note
- Plaud records for longer on a charge. Its AI is metered in transcription minutes on a monthly plan; ours is not metered at all. Read this one if the length of a single recording is what decides it.
- Scriben vs Limitless
- Limitless is a wearable pendant. This is the closest thing to a straight philosophical difference: something you wear that is visibly a recorder, against something you write with. Read this one if you care how the device reads in the room.
- Scriben vs Pocket
- The same $129 for the device. The difference is what sits behind Pocket Pro afterwards, and that Pocket clips to a phone while Scriben writes. Read this one if you are choosing between two recorders at the same price.
- Scriben vs Granola
- Granola is software, not hardware, and it is good software. It listens to your computer during a call. Read this one if you are working out whether you need a device at all.
- Switching from Limitless
- What actually changes day to day if you already own a pendant and are moving across. Written for people who have already made the decision.
What is the same everywhere
All of these record people.
Whichever one you buy, you are carrying something that captures other people’s voices, and that is governed by law that differs by state and by profession. No device on this page removes that obligation, ours included. We wrote a guide to doing it properly because the alternative is that you find out from a complaint.
The short answer
What $129 actually buys.
One payment. Not a starter tier, not an introductory rate, and not a device that needs a plan attached before it does the thing you bought it for.
Why it holds
Four things a discount cannot copy.
Every device on this page can cut its price tomorrow. None of that changes the four below, which is the actual reason to choose between them.
01 / It writes in real ink
A 0.6mm ballpoint, refills in the box. Nothing else compared on this page writes on paper. That is not a specification, it is the difference between producing a recorder and putting down the pen you were already holding.
02 / It captures with nothing switched on
64GB and up to 18 hours on the pen itself. No phone in the room, no app in the foreground, no network. A basement meeting room, a car and a flight are all the same to it, and a recording you never sync never leaves your pocket.
03 / The memory opens to your own tools
Your notes, summaries, action items and memory are readable over MCP from Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Zed, and included rather than sold as a tier. The record of your own conversations should not be locked inside one company’s app.
04 / The research behind it is published
Cutting-edge technology and research, built by us. Scriben’s work on agent memory was accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on SCALE, with the code public, and the same research runs inside the pen you carry.