Bryl vs Mentalyc vs Upheal — a privacy comparison
Three AI scribes built for therapy. One on-device, two in the cloud. A side-by-side on data residency, BAA structure, what gets uploaded, and who can read your sessions if subpoenaed.
There are three AI scribes pitching licensed therapists in 2026: Mentalyc, Upheal, and Bryl. All three claim privacy. All three are HIPAA-compliant. The architectures are not the same.
This post is the comparison I wish someone had given me before I picked one. It is not neutral — I built Bryl. But the facts below are pulled from each vendor's public documentation as of May 2026, and I will update this post if any of them change.
At a glance
| Mentalyc | Upheal | Bryl | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where audio lives | Vendor cloud (AWS) | Vendor cloud (AWS) | The iPhone in your hand |
| Where transcription runs | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | On-device (Parakeet TDT v3) |
| Where the LLM runs | OpenAI / Azure (sub-processed) | Azure OpenAI (sub-processed) | On-device (Apple FM · Phi-4-mini) |
| BAA needed | Yes — vendor signs one | Yes — vendor signs one | No — no PHI received |
| Subpoena exposure | Vendor holds audio & transcripts | Vendor holds audio & transcripts | Vendor holds nothing |
| Works in Airplane Mode | No — requires upload | No — requires upload | Yes — every step |
| EHR integration | One-click into a few EHRs | One-click into a few EHRs | Manual copy-paste |
| Pricing model | $39–79/mo SaaS | $39–69/mo SaaS | $29 Solo / $49 Practice (mo) · one-time Lifetime |
What each architecture actually does
Mentalyc
You record on your phone or laptop. The recording uploads to Mentalyc's AWS environment. Whisper (or a successor model) transcribes it in the cloud. A redaction pass removes some PII. Then OpenAI (via Azure, under a sub-processor agreement) drafts the SOAP/DAP/etc. note. The note returns to your dashboard. Audio is retained for 30 days by default for “quality and support”; you can opt to shorten that, but the upload itself is the architecture.
A signed BAA covers all of this. Mentalyc is HIPAA-compliant. The key point: they hold your patients' audio. If a court orders disclosure of a session, Mentalyc has it to disclose.
Upheal
Similar shape. Audio uploads to Upheal's AWS environment. Diarization separates therapist and client voices in the cloud. Transcription runs server-side. Azure OpenAI drafts the note. The note appears in your dashboard. Audio is retained until you delete the session.
Upheal also signs a BAA. Upheal is HIPAA-compliant. The key point is the same: they hold your patients' audio, and they hold the transcripts that come from it.
Bryl
You record on the iPhone. Audio is held under NSFileProtectionComplete during capture, then sealed in place with AES-256-GCM the moment recording stops. Parakeet TDT v3 (with Apple Speech as the fallback) transcribes on the device. PII redaction happens locally before any text reaches the model. An on-device language model (Apple Foundation Models on iPhone 15 Pro and newer; Phi-4-mini-reasoning Q4_K_M as fallback) drafts the note on the device. Audio is overwritten the instant you seal the signed note. You copy that signed note into SimplePractice or TherapyNotes by hand.
There is no Bryl cloud. There is no BAA — not because we declined to sign one, but because we never receive PHI, so HIPAA doesn't make us a Business Associate. We could not produce session audio under subpoena. We do not have it. The therapist does.
What the differences mean for the documents in your compliance file
The cloud scribes need a robust BAA from you to them, plus you need to verify their sub-processor agreements (the LLM provider, the cloud provider, the diarization vendor if separate). Each link in the chain is a place a breach can happen. None of these vendors have had a publicly disclosed PHI breach as of writing — but the surface area exists, and the surface area is the point.
Bryl needs one document in your compliance file: the architectural attestation describing the on-device data flow on the iPhone or iPad in the room. There is no chain. There is no third party.
What the differences mean for your patients
This is the part the marketing pages don't quite spell out. When you record a session with a cloud scribe, your patient's audio — their voice, their words, the things they only said because they trust the room — goes from your phone, over the public internet, to a server they have never heard of, run by a vendor they did not consent to, on infrastructure operated by a hyperscaler their therapist may not have explicitly told them about.
Three years from now, when the cloud scribe vendor has a Series B and a new acquirer, the BAA stays in place, the architecture quietly changes, and the data the original team promised would never leave somebody's laptop is sitting in a hyperscaler's data warehouse. We have written about this pattern at length.
When you record a session with Bryl, your patient's audio stays on the same device that captured it. There is no public internet involved. There is no acquirer who can change the architecture without your consent — because changing the architecture means shipping a different app, which you have to install, which you can decline.
What the differences cost you
A practical question. Per-clinician per-month, the cloud scribes are $39–79. Bryl is $29 (Solo) or $49 (Practice), with a one-time Lifetime tier at $299 / $499 because there is no cloud infrastructure to amortize.
The unit economics work out differently. A cloud scribe is paying for storage, transcription compute, LLM tokens, and a security team — for every minute of audio you upload. Bryl is paying for the iOS app and the on-device model bundle — once. A Lifetime tier is honest only if there's no recurring server bill.
Where each is the right call
I want to be specific about this:
- If you need tight one-click integration with a specific EHR right now, and you trust your panel's BAA chain, Mentalyc and Upheal are mature products with engineered EHR-paste flows. Bryl deliberately does not offer one-click EHR integration; the friction is the feature.
- If you operate a large group practice with shared template management, Upheal's admin tooling is more developed than Bryl's today. Our Practice tier is catching up.
- If your compliance threshold is a BAA and you're comfortable with a vendor holding audio under contract, the cloud scribes work.
- If your compliance threshold is architectural — the vendor cannot have your data, period — Bryl is the only one of the three that meets it.
What I'm not doing
I'm not claiming Mentalyc or Upheal are reckless. They're not. They're run by serious people with serious privacy programs, and their compliance teams are real. The disagreement is about whether contractual privacy is sufficient when architectural privacy is technically achievable. We think it isn't. Reasonable people disagree.
I'm also not claiming Bryl is the right answer for every practice. We don't do EHR auto-paste. We don't do team-wide template editing yet. We don't support iPad Pro or older iPhones. If your day-to-day depends on those, the cloud scribes are a closer fit today.
What I am claiming is this: when a therapist tells a client “the session stays between us,” they should be able to mean it literally. That's what an on-device architecture buys you — and that's the only thing it buys you that the others don't.