Sorted by what you can find out before a sales call
The top AI tools for clinical documentation
Sorted by how much you can learn before speaking to a salesperson. Freed publishes everything. Heidi publishes a free tier but not its paid prices. Suki, Nabla and Abridge publish no pricing at all — for a health system that is normal procurement, but for a clinician comparing options on a Sunday evening it means three of the five cannot be evaluated. The feature that most often changes the real price is EHR write-back: on Freed it is the top tier only.
§Our position, stated. Scriben is not in this ranking. Our clinical console is in preview, not for sale, and a page that ranks an unavailable product above available ones is an advert. Every figure below was read off the vendor’s own page on 15 September 2026. Where a vendor publishes no price, this page says so rather than repeating a third-party estimate — two of the round-ups we checked disagreed with each other by hundreds of dollars a month.
The ranking
5 scribes, in order, and why.
01 / Freed
Individual clinicians, self-serve · $39/mo Starter
- Publishes — A complete price list — Starter $39, Core $79, Premier $119 (or $104 billed annually) — and what each tier includes.
- Does not publish — Nothing material about price. Terms for larger groups are still a conversation, but a clinician can budget from the website.
- What that costs you — You can work out what a year costs before you speak to anyone, and be right. It is the only one of the five where that is true.
02 / Heidi
Clinicians and practices, self-serve · Free tier
- Publishes — A free tier with unlimited transcription and standard templates, and the fact that paid Clinician and Practice tiers exist.
- Does not publish — What the paid tiers cost. The route is a 14-day trial and then “Talk to us”.
- What that costs you — You can start for nothing and discover the price only after you have moved your workflow across, which is the wrong way round.
03 / Suki
Clinicians, organisations and platform partners · Not published
- Publishes — Its EHR integrations by name — Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth and MEDITECH — plus a developer toolkit for partners.
- Does not publish — All pricing. “Chat with our Sales team” is the only route to a number.
- What that costs you — You can check whether it fits your EHR before booking a call, which three of the others do not allow. You still cannot check cost.
04 / Nabla
Clinicians and organisations · Not published
- Publishes — That integrations exist, and that there is a free trial.
- Does not publish — Pricing, integration detail and coding. There is no pricing page at all.
- What that costs you — Almost nothing is checkable in advance, so evaluating it means starting a sales conversation.
05 / Abridge
Health systems only · Not published
- Publishes — Its deployment footprint — “trusted by 300+ health systems” — and that integration is deep and enterprise-grade.
- Does not publish — Pricing entirely, and any self-serve route to buy.
- What that costs you — Normal for enterprise procurement, and of no use at all to an individual clinician on a Sunday evening.
Side by side
The same facts, in a table.
- Freed
- $39/mo Starter — publishes: A complete price list — Starter $39, Core $79, Premier $119 (or $104 billed annually) — and what each tier includes. Source: getfreed.ai/pricing
- Heidi
- Free tier — publishes: A free tier with unlimited transcription and standard templates, and the fact that paid Clinician and Practice tiers exist. Source: heidihealth.com/pricing
- Suki
- Not published — publishes: Its EHR integrations by name — Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth and MEDITECH — plus a developer toolkit for partners. Source: suki.ai
- Nabla
- Not published — publishes: That integrations exist, and that there is a free trial. Source: nabla.com
- Abridge
- Not published — publishes: Its deployment footprint — “trusted by 300+ health systems” — and that integration is deep and enterprise-grade. Source: abridge.com
All figures checked on 15 September 2026 against each vendor’s own site. Three of the five publish no pricing at all; where that is the case this table says “not published” rather than quoting an estimate. Prices change — check theirs before you buy, and tell us if anything here has gone out of date.
Before any of them
Consent, records and the thing nobody can certify.
Recording a patient encounter is governed by state law, by your professional obligations and by your employer’s policy, and the tool you choose does not change any of them. Fourteen US states require every party to consent; where you and the patient are in different states, assume the stricter rule. Our guide to recording people lawfully sets out which applies where you are. There is no such thing as HIPAA certification, so no vendor on this page holds one and none can — what you should ask for instead is a signed Business Associate Agreement, and confirmation of where audio is processed and how long it is kept. This is general information for practitioners, not medical or legal advice.
Where this comes from
What we make, and why it is not ranked above.
Scriben is a real ballpoint pen that records the room to its own storage for up to 18 hours with no phone and no network. Scriben’s clinical console is in preview and not yet available to buy. The pen ships today at $129; the healthcare workflows described on healthcare.scriben.ai are not live yet. Every tool ranked above is built for the consultation itself; a pen reaches the conversations around it — the corridor handover, the call from the car, the family meeting — which is the part none of them capture. If that is the gap you have, join the healthcare preview; if you need a scribe in the exam room today, buy one of the five above.