BastionGPT vs Mentalyc: AI Therapy Notes Comparison for 2026

Unlimited notes, with no credit tiers

Mentalyc meters documentation with monthly note credits: 40 on Mini ($14.99 per month billed annually), 100 on Basic ($29.99), 160 on Pro ($59.99), and 330 on Super ($99.99). Billed monthly, those plans run $19.99 to $119.99. Unlimited notes require a Team plan seat at $49.99 per month billed annually.

A full-time caseload of 25 to 30 sessions per week produces roughly 100 to 120 notes per month. That volume exceeds Basic's 100-credit cap, so the working tier for a full-time solo therapist is Pro: $719.88 per year billed annually, or $839.88 billed monthly.

BastionGPT does not meter notes. Professional costs $20 per user per month ($240 per year), and notes, transcription, and AI assistant chat are all unlimited. A full-time therapist saves roughly $480 to $600 per year compared with Mentalyc Pro, and there is no month where a wave of intakes or catch-up documentation runs the meter out. A five-clinician group pays $2,999.40 per year for Mentalyc Team seats ($49.99 x 5 x 12); the same group runs $1,200 on BastionGPT Professional, or $2,700 on Professional Plus with document analysis and manual model selection included.

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Sessions up to 240 minutes on every plan

Mentalyc caps recording length by plan: 75 minutes on Mini and Basic, 130 minutes on Pro, Super, and Team. A standard 50-minute session fits comfortably. Extended intakes, EMDR intensives, family sessions that run long, and group therapy push against those caps, and the only way to raise a cap is to change plans.

BastionGPT records up to 240 minutes per session on every plan, live or from uploaded audio. A three-hour group session, a long psychiatric intake, or a full IEP meeting fits inside one recording at the $20 entry price.

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Every note format, client type, and modality at the entry price

On Mentalyc, plan choice determines who you can document and how. Mini and Basic cover individual adult therapy only, with SOAP, DAP, and intake notes. Couples, kids and teens, and family client types arrive at Pro, along with BIRP, PIRP, GIRP, PIE, and SIRP formats, EMDR, play therapy, and psychiatry modalities, and auto-computed CPT codes. Group therapy notes arrive at Super. The 14-day free trial runs at the Pro level, so the plan that matches what you tried is Pro, at $59.99 per month billed annually.

BastionGPT includes every documentation capability on every plan. The AI scribe produces SOAP, Detailed SOAP, DAP, BIRP, and progress notes, a Custom Note tab accepts any free-form prompt per recording, and you can upload sample notes so BastionGPT matches your writing style, whether that style is EMDR documentation, play therapy observations, or psychiatric medication management. Couples, family, and group sessions are covered at $20 per user per month, and a Saved Prompts library with folder organization and team sharing is included on every plan.

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Ten speakers, labeled by name and role

Couples work, family sessions, group therapy, and care-team meetings involve more voices than a solo session. BastionGPT recognizes up to 10 speakers per session, separates the transcript by voice, and automatically labels each speaker's name and role, for example clinician, client, or parent. It also captures telehealth sessions alongside Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet without a visible recording bot.

Mentalyc supports group documentation on its Super and Team plans, generating a collective group note plus individual notes per member, and it publishes no maximum speaker count and no per-voice transcript attribution. For a therapist whose week includes one couples session and one process group, speaker-labeled transcripts are the difference between reviewing what was said and reconstructing who said it.

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A full clinical AI assistant, not only session notes

Mentalyc's platform centers on the session: audio in, note out, plus treatment plans and progress tracking built from session content. It does not include a general clinical AI assistant.

BastionGPT includes an unlimited AI assistant on every plan. Therapists use it to draft insurance appeal letters when sessions are denied, write coordination-of-care and school accommodation letters, build treatment plans and discharge summaries, create patient education materials, and review their own documentation for incorrect names, pronouns, vague language, and suspected under- or over-coding. BastionGPT achieved 99.3% sentence-level accuracy on clinical documentation tasks in a peer-reviewed study by Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital researchers, and reports that AI scribe users reclaim an average of 90 minutes per day.

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Reads the records your practice receives

Behavioral health work involves documents that never came from a recorded session: psychological testing reports, prior treatment records, hospital discharge paperwork, school IEPs and 504 plans, and insurance denials. Mentalyc does not take documents; its inputs are session audio, dictated recaps, or typed summaries.

On Professional Plus and Ultra plans, BastionGPT reads 10+ documents at once with 1,000+ pages of combined context, covering PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, HTML, plain text, and JPG or PNG images, including scanned records. A clinician can upload a psychological evaluation, three years of prior notes, and a denial letter, 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.

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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. Model quality drives note quality, and naming the models lets you verify exactly what is reading your session content.

Mentalyc does not name its models. Its FAQ describes note generation by machine learning algorithms, large language models, and statistical models, with no user visibility into which model handles a session and no way to choose.

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Named coverage for substance use and school-based records

Behavioral health practices routinely handle records with protection beyond HIPAA. Substance use disorder treatment records fall under 42 CFR Part 2, and school-based services generate FERPA-covered education records.

BastionGPT names support for HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, FERPA, PIPEDA, PHIPA, and Australian APP requirements on every plan, with PHI residency in the United States, Canada, or Australia based on billing geography.

Mentalyc's FAQ addresses Part 2 directly: it provides HIPAA-aligned safeguards under a BAA, states that Part 2-required consent and disclosure obligations remain the provider's responsibility, and does not provide a certificate confirming Part 2 compliance. FERPA support is not published. Mentalyc states compliance with Canadian standards (PIPEDA, PHIPA, PIPA, PHIA) and the Australian Privacy Principles, with data hosted in the United States. For a SUD program, a school-based therapist, or a practice outside the US, those are exactly the lines to compare during procurement.

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A data lifecycle you control

Both vendors state that your data is never used to train AI models. The differences sit in where data lives, how long it stays, and who sets the rules.

Mentalyc anonymizes transcripts, deletes session audio after processing (its FAQ notes audio is stored for up to 3 days in case a note needs to be fixed or retried), holds SOC 2 Type II certification, and hosts data in the United States on AWS.

BastionGPT puts retention under your control: chats persist until you delete them, documents are removed on deletion or after 30 days of account inactivity, and transcript retention is user-configurable from 1 to 365 days, which matters if your board or malpractice carrier expects source material kept longer than a note cycle. 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. In three years serving more than 10,000 healthcare organizations, BastionGPT has had zero breaches of protected health information.

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Works with any EHR, and grows with your organization

Mentalyc's EHR integration is a Chrome browser extension that inserts finished notes into web-based EHRs: SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Jane, TheraNest, Osmind, Tebra, Kareo, and others. Its FAQ is precise about the boundary: the extension works with EHRs that run in a browser. Practices on desktop or client-server EHR systems transfer notes manually, and organizations whose IT policies block third-party browser extensions cannot use the integration at all.

BastionGPT works alongside 50+ EMR/EHR systems, web-based or desktop, through simple copy-paste and document workflows that require no extension and no IT approval. Organizations that want deeper integration use the public BastionGPT API, priced from $45 per month with deployment regions in the US, Canada, and Australia, and large organizations on the Ultra plan ($75 per user per month, starting at 100 users) run BastionGPT within their existing enterprise cloud with SSO. One platform covers the therapists, the psychiatrists and PMHNPs, and the billing and admin staff who never touch a session recording.

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