BastionGPT vs Abridge: AI Medical Scribe Comparison for 2026

You can buy it today

This is the single largest difference between the two platforms, and it is structural.

Abridge sells exclusively to enterprise health systems. There is no pricing page on abridge.com, no self-serve signup, no individual plan, and no free trial for independent clinicians. Purchasing requires organizational procurement, IT involvement, and contract negotiation, and independent 2026 reviews report typical timelines of 3 to 6 months from contract to live deployment. Abridge does not publish what it charges; independent analyses peg enterprise licenses at roughly $2,500 per provider per year (about $208 per month), with other 2026 estimates ranging up to $800+ per provider per month plus implementation fees. Those figures are third-party estimates, which is itself the point: the only way to learn Abridge's price is to enter a sales process.

BastionGPT publishes its pricing and holds it steady. Professional starts at $20 per user per month. Professional Plus, which adds the full document analysis suite and manual model selection, costs $45. Ultra, the organizational tier with SSO and deployment inside your existing enterprise cloud, is published at $75. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, carries a 45-day money-back guarantee, and includes a free month on annual billing.

The math for a five-clinician practice: at the low end of independent estimates (about $2,500 per provider per year), five clinicians on Abridge would run roughly $12,500 per year, before implementation fees, and only if Abridge would sell to a five-clinician practice at all. BastionGPT Professional Plus runs $2,700 per year ($45 x 5 x 12), starting this week.

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A full AI assistant, not just a visit note

Abridge's outputs are anchored to the clinical encounter: the note, coding specificity, orders, and a patient after-visit summary. Documentation work that starts outside the exam room sits outside the product. There is no document upload and analysis feature, no spreadsheet support, and no general assistant for drafting a referral letter or an insurance appeal from a records review.

BastionGPT includes an unlimited general AI assistant on every plan. Clinicians use it to draft referral letters, insurance appeal letters, treatment plans, and patient education materials; review documentation for incorrect names, pronouns, vague language, and suspected under- or over-coding; and analyze lab summaries and spreadsheets. The scribe and the assistant share one workspace, so a transcript can flow directly into any downstream document.

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Document analysis Abridge does not attempt

On Professional Plus and Ultra plans, BastionGPT reads 10+ documents at once, up to 1,000+ pages of combined context. Supported formats include PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, HTML, plain text, and JPG or PNG images, including scanned PDFs, charts, and graphs. A clinician can upload a full patient history, a psychological evaluation, and records from multiple providers, then query, summarize, and cross-reference all of it in one conversation. The Professional plan covers a single PDF, Word, or text document up to 30 pages.

Abridge generates its outputs from the recorded encounter and EHR context configured by the health system. Uploading outside records, insurance documents, or spreadsheets for analysis is not part of the product.

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A scribe that knows who is speaking

BastionGPT recognizes up to 10 speakers per session, live or from uploaded audio, with sessions up to 240 minutes. Speaker diarization separates the transcript by voice, and BastionGPT's AI automatically labels each speaker's name and role in the transcript: clinician, patient, or parent, for example. That matters for family sessions, group therapy, care conferences, and any visit with more people than a doctor and one patient. Abridge documents multi-party conversations, including in nursing settings, but publishes no speaker count and no session length limit.

BastionGPT also produces SOAP, Detailed SOAP, DAP, BIRP, H&P, and progress notes, and a Custom Note tab accepts any free-form prompt per recording: narrative formats, parent-friendly summaries, forensic documentation, and other specialty outputs. You can upload example notes so BastionGPT matches your writing style. Abridge's note formats are specialty templates configured through the enterprise deployment, which means format changes route through your organization rather than through you.

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AI models you can see and choose

BastionGPT names its engines: licensed and HIPAA-compliant versions of GPT-5.5, Claude, and Gemini 3 Pro. Every plan selects the best model for each task automatically, and Professional Plus adds manual model selection plus early access to new models as they ship.

Abridge builds on OpenAI foundation models through its proprietary Contextual Reasoning Engine, and announced early access to GPT-5.5 in April 2026. The clinician has no visibility into or choice over which model reads a given encounter; those decisions live inside the platform and the enterprise configuration.

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Your data is never training data

The two platforms take different positions here, in writing.

BastionGPT never uses your prompts, documents, or audio to train AI models, and never shares them with OpenAI or any other AI provider for training. Chats and transcripts are wiped after 30 days by default, and you can delete sooner or retain longer. You keep full ownership and full control.

Abridge's privacy policy states that it uses de-identified data to refine its algorithms and machine learning applications. Audio recordings and transcripts in health system deployments are automatically deleted on the organization's schedule, commonly around 30 days (Kaiser Permanente has stated 14 days for its deployment), and that schedule is set by the enterprise, not the clinician. Abridge's clinician terms also place responsibility for obtaining patient consent on the user. That allocation of responsibility has drawn attention: in December 2025 and April 2026, patients filed proposed class actions against Sharp HealthCare, Sutter Health, and MemorialCare alleging that visits were recorded with Abridge without informed consent. Abridge is not a defendant in those suits, and the claims are unproven, but they underline a practical truth: with an ambient scribe, consent workflows and data handling are your risk to manage. Choosing a platform that never trains on your data and puts retention in your hands removes an entire category of that risk.

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A signed BAA on every plan, without a procurement cycle

BastionGPT enters a signed Business Associate Agreement with every customer on every plan, including the free trial, and supports HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, FERPA, PIPEDA, PHIPA, and Australian APP requirements. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, runs on HITRUST CSF certified and SOC 2 Type II attested Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and is independently penetration tested at least annually. Customers in Canada and Australia keep their data hosted in country by default, a published option Abridge does not offer. In three years serving more than 10,000 healthcare organizations, BastionGPT has had zero breaches of protected health information.

Abridge executes BAAs with covered entities as part of its enterprise contracts, and its Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, CCPA, TX-RAMP, and WCAG 2.2 AA. For a health system, that coverage is solid. For a solo practitioner or small practice, it is unreachable: there is no self-serve BAA because there is no self-serve product. For clinicians handling substance use disorder records (42 CFR Part 2) or school-based health data (FERPA), Abridge publishes no coverage for either framework; BastionGPT supports both.

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Published pricing all the way up, including the API

Transparency extends past the plan cards. Developers and organizations building healthcare AI features get a published BastionGPT API: a $45 per month developer plan with a 30-day developer trial, published token and audio rates, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and no enterprise minimums. Abridge references custom integrations for enterprise customers, but publishes no API pricing, rate limits, or self-serve developer path. If your practice, platform, or billing company wants to budget an integration from the website, only one of the two makes that possible.

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Verified ratings from buyers like you

BastionGPT holds a 4.8 out of 5 average across the three major verified B2B review directories: Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. Reviewers most often cite time saved on documentation and the freedom to use AI on real cases because data protection is built in.

Abridge earned Best in KLAS for ambient AI in 2025 and 2026, a meaningful award based on surveys of enterprise health system leaders and clinicians. What Abridge does not have is a meaningful footprint on the self-serve review directories where individual buyers compare tools, because individual buyers cannot purchase it. Physician forum threads about Abridge consistently raise the same two frustrations: pricing that requires a sales call to learn, and a product that is unavailable outside a contracted health system. Ratings and recognition shift over time, so this page cites the source and date for each figure; the links in the sources section lead to the live numbers.

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