Mentalyc vs Scriber — Which AI Medical Scribe Is Right for Therapists?

Mentalyc and Scriber are the two behavioral-health-specific AI scribes most likely to appear on a therapist's shortlist. Both are built for mental-health clinicians — not retrofitted from a general medical scribe. Both generate structured progress notes, intake summaries, and treatment plan documentation from session audio. Both comply with HIPAA. The fact that they overlap this much on positioning is exactly why the comparison is worth doing carefully: the differences are in the details, and the details are the ones that affect daily workflow.

This page lays out where each product is genuinely stronger, where the marketing language diverges from what the products actually do, and how to decide which one fits your practice. If you are a Mentalyc user considering a switch, or a clinician evaluating both tools for the first time, the goal is enough real information to make the right call without a sales call.

Quick verdict

Choose Mentalyc if you want a scribe with a well-established presence in the mental-health niche, a track record with licensed therapists, LCSWs, and LMFTs, and comfort from knowing the product has been used at scale in behavioral-health practices. Choose Scriber if you conduct telehealth sessions on Doxy.me and want a native integration rather than a workaround, if transcription speed and engine choice matter to your workflow, or if you are building or managing a group practice and want a vendor actively investing in multi-clinician features. Both tools are appropriate for behavioral health clinicians and the note quality for core therapy formats is comparable. The decision turns on telehealth workflow, pricing, and how important engine flexibility is to you.

Side-by-side comparison

Feature	Mentalyc	Scriber
Free tier	Yes	No (7-day trial)
BAA at signup (all tiers)	Yes (verify tier specifics)	Yes — all tiers including free
Audio retained after note	No	No
Direct Doxy.me integration	No (copy-paste / second device)	Yes — native (shipped April 2026)
Direct EHR integrations	Copy-paste compatible	Copy-paste compatible
Primary audience	Therapists, LCSWs, LMFTs, psychologists	Behavioral health, psychiatry, SUD
Note formats	SOAP, DAP, BIRP, SIRP, intake, treatment plan, progress, group therapy	SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP, SIRP, intake, biopsychosocial, treatment plan, mental status exam, discharge
Group / couple therapy notes	Yes	Yes
Number of STT engines	Not publicly disclosed	7 (xAI, Azure, MAI, Speechmatics, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Microsoft AI)
xAI transcription speed	Not available	~3.05 sec per 50-min session
Multi-language support	Yes	Yes (engine-dependent)
Custom templates	Yes	Yes
Group / practice features	Available	Active Phase 1 roadmap investment
HIPAA compliance	Yes	Yes

Where Mentalyc wins

Mentalyc's advantages are rooted in tenure and specificity within the mental-health niche.

Established mental-health focus. Mentalyc has been positioned as a therapy-specific scribe since its early product iterations, and its brand recognition among licensed therapists, LCSWs, and psychologists is meaningful. Clinicians in mental health communities — online forums, peer supervision groups, professional associations — are more likely to have encountered a Mentalyc recommendation from a colleague. That peer-recommendation surface is a real signal of product maturity in the therapy niche, and it matters when you are evaluating a tool you will use with sensitive clinical content every day.

Therapy-specific note format depth. Mentalyc's note formats are tuned specifically for outpatient therapy workflows: individual therapy, couples sessions, group therapy progress notes, intake assessments, and treatment planning documentation for behavioral health. The product has had longer to refine these formats based on feedback from a user base of licensed therapists. Scriber covers the same core formats, but Mentalyc's longer feedback loop with therapy-specific clinicians means those formats have gone through more real-world iteration.

Content and community presence. Mentalyc has invested in educational content targeting therapists — blog posts, workflow guides, and positioning around the specific compliance and documentation challenges that mental-health clinicians face. That content is indexed, shared in peer communities, and represents a body of work that a newer-to-market competitor is still building. Clinicians who want to read about how to use an AI scribe in a DBT context, or how to handle informed consent documentation for AI-assisted notes in a therapy practice, are more likely to find that content already published under Mentalyc's domain.

Name recognition in mental-health peer networks. In the behavioral health SaaS market, name recognition in peer networks (therapist Facebook groups, APA-adjacent communities, NASW forums, state association listservs) translates directly into lower decision friction. Mentalyc has more of that recognition today than Scriber, which is earlier in its growth curve. If your practice makes decisions partly based on what trusted colleagues are already using, Mentalyc's peer presence is a real consideration.

One important clarification: neither Mentalyc nor Scriber has a productized, bidirectional integration with major therapy EHRs like SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, or Valant. Both rely on copy-paste for those workflows. A solutions page listing a platform as compatible does not mean a real integration exists — verify the actual workflow before assuming otherwise.

Where Scriber wins

Scriber's advantages concentrate in integration depth and transcription infrastructure.

Direct Doxy.me telehealth integration. This is the clearest functional differentiator between the two products as of April 2026. Scriber connects to a live Doxy.me telehealth room natively: the clinician launches the Doxy session from inside Scriber, and the session audio flows into Scriber's transcription and note-generation pipeline without a second device, a browser tab switch, or a manual export step after the session ends. Mentalyc does not have a Doxy.me integration in this sense — the workflow requires running Mentalyc separately from the telehealth call, capturing audio through a second device or screen-recording workaround, and then processing it through the scribe. For clinicians whose telehealth practice runs on Doxy.me, that difference is not cosmetic. It affects every single telehealth session, every working day. Scriber is the only scribe in the market with a genuine native Doxy.me integration as of this writing.

Seven transcription engines on a single subscription. Scriber exposes seven STT engines — xAI, Azure Speech, Microsoft AI, Speechmatics, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and MAI — switchable by any subscriber without a plan upgrade. Mentalyc does not publicly disclose its transcription infrastructure or the number of engines available. The practical implication is flexibility: different engines perform differently on accents, on specialized clinical vocabulary (DSM-5 diagnostic language, psychopharmacology terms, medication names), and on audio quality. A clinician doing structured psychotherapy sessions in a quiet office may have different accuracy needs than a clinician conducting intake sessions over a variable-quality telehealth connection. Having seven engines means you can optimize rather than accept a single vendor's choice.

xAI transcription speed. Scriber's xAI engine processes a 50-minute session transcript in approximately 3.05 seconds in internal benchmarks. Speechmatics and Azure process the same session in approximately five seconds. Mentalyc does not publish transcription speed data. For a clinician doing back-to-back sessions with ten minutes between appointments, that processing time is not trivial — the faster the transcript, the sooner the note draft is available to review and sign.

Group and multi-clinician investment. Scriber's Phase 1 roadmap includes group-admin features, supervision workflows, and multi-clinician account management as explicit deliverables. If you are a practice administrator evaluating scribes for a team of therapists, Scriber is actively building in that direction. Verify the current feature availability when you evaluate — roadmap promises are not shipped features — but the investment signal matters when you are choosing a vendor for a multi-year relationship.

AdvancedCare ecosystem adjacency. For practices using AdvancedCare for RCM, claims processing, or eligibility verification, Scriber's position within that ecosystem creates natural adjacency between documentation and billing workflows. Mentalyc does not have this connection.

Pricing

Mentalyc is priced at $69.99 per month. Mentalyc offers a free tier and Scriber offers a 7-day trial, so you can evaluate either product on real sessions before committing. See scriberapp.com/pricing for current Scriber plan pricing.

Free tiers in this category typically cap note volume or session length — enough to run a week or two of your actual caseload through each product, but not enough for a full-time practice indefinitely.

For group pricing, both vendors offer custom plans. If you are pricing for a practice of five or more clinicians, expect to book a demo call rather than relying on published rate cards. Neither product has a public group pricing schedule that is specific enough to compare without a conversation.

Compliance

Both tools are HIPAA-compliant. Both offer Business Associate Agreements and host on cloud infrastructure covered under a HIPAA BAA. Both delete session audio after the note is generated and do not retain audio for model training or secondary use. On compliance fundamentals, the two tools are comparable.

Scriber signs a BAA with every user at signup on every plan — no enterprise requirement to access the agreement. Mentalyc provides a BAA; the specifics of which tiers it covers and the execution process should be confirmed directly with their team before processing PHI.

One disclosure specific to Scriber: the xAI transcription engine is available but disabled for production use by default until a separate BAA covering xAI's infrastructure is executed. All other Scriber engines — Speechmatics, Microsoft AI, Azure, MAI, Deepgram, AssemblyAI — are BAA-covered under the standard signup agreement. Clinicians who want to use xAI should confirm BAA coverage before routing PHI through that engine.

For clinicians in substance use disorder treatment, both tools' no-audio-retention defaults are compatible with 42 CFR Part 2. If your state imposes mental health privacy rules beyond HIPAA — California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts each have additional requirements — review those specifics with a compliance officer rather than relying on a general HIPAA claim from either vendor.

When to pick Mentalyc over Scriber

You do not use Doxy.me for telehealth and the direct integration advantage does not apply to your workflow.
Peer adoption evidence matters to you, and you want the vendor with more visible presence in therapist communities, professional forums, and licensed-clinician networks.
You want a therapy-specific scribe with a longer feedback loop on therapy note formats — individual sessions, group sessions, couples work, intakes, and treatment plans refined by years of licensed-therapist feedback.
Your practice uses another telehealth platform (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams) and your workflow involves a second device or browser tab regardless of which scribe you use — in that case, Scriber's Doxy.me advantage does not apply.
You prefer a vendor with more published educational content about therapy-specific AI documentation workflows, HIPAA considerations specific to mental health, and licensed-clinician use cases.
Month-to-month billing flexibility matters to your subscription management preferences, and Mentalyc's monthly plan fits that.

When to pick Scriber over Mentalyc

You use Doxy.me for telehealth and want the session and the scribe in a single window, not two separate tools requiring a second device or a copy-paste step after every session.
Transcription speed and engine choice matter to your workflow — seven engines on one subscription means you can optimize for your specific session type, accent, and vocabulary rather than accepting a single vendor default.
You run a group practice and want a vendor whose near-term roadmap explicitly prioritizes multi-clinician features, supervision workflows, and group-admin tooling.
You are in the AdvancedCare ecosystem and want your documentation workflow adjacent to your RCM and billing workflow.
A BAA that is executed at signup, without requiring a separate enterprise conversation, matters for your practice's compliance process.
You want access to Scriber's xAI engine for sessions where 3.05-second transcript processing is meaningful — especially back-to-back scheduling with limited transition time.

Try both before you commit

Both tools can be tried before you commit. A week of real sessions through each product — your actual caseload, your actual note formats, your actual telehealth platform — will tell you more than any comparison page can. Therapy note quality differences between scribes are most visible on your specific session content: the vocabulary your clients use, your phrasing patterns, the format your payer or supervisor requires.

Start a free Scriber account at scriberapp.com/register. No credit card required. If you use Doxy.me, test the direct integration on your first session and compare the workflow against what you experience with Mentalyc. If you are running both tools in parallel, route the same session type through each and compare the draft notes on clinical accuracy, format compliance, and editing time. The right answer is the one that produces a note you want to sign, consistently, across your full caseload.

Mentalyc vs Scriber