Nabla vs Heidi Health: head-to-head (2026)

These are two of the most-evaluated ambient scribes in the category, and they win on different axes. Nabla is our 2026 Editor's Pick — it leads on hands-on note quality and ships the full compliance quartet. Heidi Health is the broadest-reach tool in the field, with the best community template system and the most genuinely usable free plan.

If you're shortlisting both, the decision comes down to whether you weight clinical-note precision and compliance breadth (Nabla) or language reach, template depth and a free entry point that isn't a teaser (Heidi).

This is our 2026 head-to-head — sourced facts from each vendor's published material, plus our hands-on testing findings on both.

At a glance

	Nabla	Heidi Health
Our editorial score	9.0 / 10 (Editor's Pick)	8.0 / 10
Status	Hands-on tested	Hands-on tested
HQ	Brooklyn, USA / Paris, France	Melbourne, Australia
Founded	2018	2019
Compliance	HIPAA + SOC 2 Type II + GDPR + ISO 27001	HIPAA + SOC 2 + GDPR + APP + Cyber Essentials Plus
Audio storage	Not stored by default	Region-localized residency
Free entry	Free tier — 30 consults/mo	Free plan — unlimited basic notes, 10 Pro Actions/mo
Pro pricing	~US$120/mo (public pricing page offline as of May 2026)	$150/clinician/mo billed annually
Languages	35	110 across 116 countries
Scale	85,000+ clinicians, 130+ health orgs, 20M+ annual encounters	2M+ consults per week
Funding	$120M through Series C (June 2025)	~$100M, $465M valuation (Point72-led Series B, June 2025)
Stand-out feature	Full four-cert compliance + agentic roadmap	Template Community + Heidi Evidence

Note quality — our hands-on testing finding

This is where the editorial scores diverge most. In our hands-on testing, Nabla's note quality consistently outperformed Heidi's on dense, detail-heavy consultations. Nabla scores 9.0 clinical precision and 8.9 note quality in our rubric; Heidi sits at 7.7 and 7.9.

Both are genuinely good for routine primary-care visits — a 15-minute GP consult comes out clean from either. The gap opens on dense specialist encounters: multi-problem visits, medication-heavy psychiatry notes, complex assessments. Heidi's note quality lagged the precision-focused leaders there in our sessions; Nabla held up better.

One caveat that cuts the other way: Nabla polishes — it rewrites the consultation into a fluent note, and on the densest visits that polishing can occasionally smooth over a detail. It's a different failure mode from a hallucination (covered in our AI hallucinations guide), but it still means you read the draft. Neither tool removes the clinician's review step.

The right way to confirm this for your own work is to run a week of real consultations on both in parallel and read the drafts line-by-line.

Compliance and data residency

Nabla ships the full compliance quartet — HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and ISO 27001 — the only tested tool in our catalog to enumerate all four. No audio is stored by default, and there's an explicit no-training-on-customer-data position. With a Paris office alongside Brooklyn, the GDPR posture is first-class, not bolted on.

Heidi Health ships HIPAA + SOC 2 + GDPR + the Australian Privacy Principles + Cyber Essentials Plus, with region-localized data residency — the consultation stays in the region it happens in. That's a strong, multi-region posture; the one cert it doesn't enumerate is ISO 27001, which some enterprise procurement teams specifically ask for.

For most buyers both clear the bar. If your procurement runs a hard ISO 27001 checklist, Nabla ticks it and Heidi doesn't. If your priority is regional data residency across many countries, Heidi's model is purpose-built for it. See our compliance quartet guide for the full framework.

Languages and global reach

This is Heidi's clearest win. Heidi supports 110 languages across 116 countries and processes 2M+ consults a week — the broadest reach of any tool we track. Nabla supports 35 languages — fewer, but covering the major clinical markets.

One specific gap worth knowing for Nordic readers: Nabla does not cover Norwegian or Swedish, so despite its EU-region availability it isn't a fit for Nordic-only practices. Heidi's wider net is more likely to include your patients' languages if you run a multilingual clinic — though headline language counts always warrant a real-consultation test, because per-language depth varies.

Templates and product surface

Heidi's Template Community is the best community template system in the category. Verified clinicians publish and share templates — NHS GP Consult, Psychology Session Notes, ADHD Assessment, SOAP Detailed, Mental Health Appointment and thousands more — filterable by specialty, location and category. A separate surface, Heidi Evidence, handles between-patient clinical Q&A with sourced citations. If your workflow benefits from not building every template yourself, Heidi's library is a real time-save.

Nabla has matured well beyond pure documentation: ambient capture plus dictation, coding, and agentic clinical workflows on one platform, with a mobile app, Chrome extension and a public developer API. Its bet is depth of the documentation-and-beyond stack rather than a community marketplace.

Free tier and pricing

Both offer a free entry point — but they're shaped differently:

• Nabla: a free tier capped at 30 consultations per month. Adequate for a part-time clinician or a multi-week evaluation, below a full-time consult load. Pro is reported around US$120/mo per provider — note the public pricing page is offline as of May 2026, so confirm current rates with the vendor.
• Heidi: a free plan with unlimited basic notes but capped at 10 "Pro Actions" per month (custom templates, Ask Heidi, document generation). Pro is $150/clinician/month billed annually — raised in 2026 from ~$90.

Heidi's free plan is more usable as a permanent option for a light-volume clinician (unlimited basic notes), while Nabla's free tier is a better full-feature evaluation within its 30-consult cap. Either way, both let you test on real consultations before paying — which is exactly what you should do.

Who should choose which

Choose Nabla if:

• Note quality on dense, specialist consultations is your primary requirement.
• Your procurement wants the full HIPAA + SOC 2 Type II + GDPR + ISO 27001 quartet enumerated.
• You want a scribe on a clear path beyond documentation — dictation, coding, agentic workflows.
• You want a no-compromise compliance posture with genuine EU presence.

Choose Heidi Health if:

• You run a multilingual clinic and need the widest language net (110 languages).
• The Template Community would save you building specialty templates from scratch.
• You want a free plan usable as a permanent light-volume option, not just a trial.
• Heidi Evidence's between-patient clinical Q&A fits how you work.

Neither, if:

• You're a Nordic-only practice — Nabla doesn't cover Norwegian or Swedish; look at Stenoly or the best scribes by country pages.
• You need the strongest US-market note quality at a transparent self-serve price — see Commure Scribe.

Bottom line

Nabla is our Editor's Pick for 2026, and this comparison is a large part of why — it leads on hands-on note quality and is the only tested tool shipping the complete compliance quartet. Heidi Health earns its 8.0 on the strength of unmatched language reach, the best template system in the field, and a free plan that's genuinely usable rather than a teaser.

For a single clinician whose core need is the cleanest possible note with the most defensible compliance story, Nabla. For a multilingual or multi-specialty clinic that values template breadth and global reach, Heidi has a real case.

Track both tools' verified facts on their review pages: Nabla and Heidi Health. For a side-by-side data view see /compare/heidi-health-vs-nabla, or the full ranking.