Supanote alternative
A Supanote alternative at the same price — without the cloud round trip
Supanote and TherapyDraft both cost $39/mo for unlimited notes. That makes this the cleanest price-neutral comparison in the 2026 therapy-scribe market: same dollar, different architecture. You're choosing whether your session audio leaves your Mac or not.
TL;DR
Supanote is a well-reviewed cloud scribe that's popular with US private-practice therapists. TherapyDraft ships the same SOAP, DAP, BIRP, and GIRP output at the same $39/mo flat price, but the inference runs on your Mac — not on Supanote's servers. If cost is your deciding factor, both tools land in the same place. The tie-breaker is where the audio is processed, which is a trust-model decision, not a pricing decision.
Why therapists compare Supanote and TherapyDraft
This comparison shows up most often in three scenarios:
- You're on Supanote and your practice is changing. You've added a high-profile client, you're doing forensic work, or your malpractice carrier has started asking questions about AI vendors. The BAA is no longer enough; you need architectural separation.
- You're choosing between scribes for the first time. Supanote came up in a clinician-forum thread; TherapyDraft came up in a "HIPAA by architecture" thread. Same price, so which one?
- You're a supervisor or group-practice owner. You're responsible for a team of clinicians and the trust story you tell clients depends on which tool the team uses.
In all three, the material difference isn't feature count. Both tools draft the four main progress-note formats competently. The difference is what travels over your internet connection during a session recording.
How TherapyDraft is different
Supanote's drafting pipeline is typical of 2026 cloud AI scribes: session audio is uploaded to the vendor's cloud, transcribed by a cloud speech model, drafted by a cloud LLM, and returned as text. Supanote's privacy policy and BAA cover this correctly, and there is no reason to distrust their implementation. But the audio does leave your network.
TherapyDraft is architected so it cannot leave. The Mac app ships with whisper.cpp (the Apple-Silicon-optimized build of OpenAI's Whisper family) and a 4-bit-quantized Qwen 2.5 14B model running through Apple's MLX runtime. The app's network entitlements whitelist two hosts: Stripe for license activation, and our update server for version checks. Nothing else. macOS's sandbox enforces this at the kernel level; the app can't reach another host even if a bug tried to make it. You can verify with Activity Monitor → Network tab during a session — bytes sent per minute stays at near-zero.
Side-by-side comparison
| Supanote | TherapyDraft | |
|---|---|---|
| Where inference runs | Supanote cloud | Your Mac (local) |
| Session audio leaves your device | Yes (uploaded for transcription + drafting) | No (blocked by macOS entitlements) |
| HIPAA posture | Signed BAA with Supanote, Inc. | No BAA needed — no PHI is ever transmitted |
| Subprocessor chain | Cloud speech provider + LLM provider + storage | None for PHI — zero subprocessors touch audio or text |
| Works offline | No | Yes (flight mode supported end-to-end) |
| Note formats | SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP, + specialty | SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP (v1) |
| Export / EHR paste presets | Standard copy-paste | Per-EHR presets (SimplePractice, TheraNest, TherapyNotes, Jane) |
| Tamper-evident receipt | Server-side audit log | Hash-chained JSONL on your disk (showable to clients) |
| Platform | Web (cross-platform) | macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon (M1–M4) |
| Price | $39/mo (standard tier at 2026 rates) | $39/mo or $349/yr |
| Free trial | Limited sessions | 10 sessions, no credit card |
The same-price, different-trust-model decision
When two tools cost the same, the decision collapses to "which trust model do I prefer?" The options:
- Contractual trust (Supanote). You trust the vendor. You trust their subprocessors. You trust that the BAA is enforceable if something goes wrong. This is the entire cloud SaaS market and most of it works fine.
- Architectural trust (TherapyDraft). You don't need to trust the vendor, because the vendor never touches your data. The OS enforces it. The trust moves from "we promise" to "the network connection is closed, see for yourself."
Clinicians who have been burned by a vendor — either directly, or by watching a peer get tangled up in a subprocessor's breach — tend to prefer option 2 the second time. Clinicians who haven't think option 1 is fine, and for most practices it is.
When Supanote is still the right choice
- You're not on a Mac. TherapyDraft is Apple-Silicon-only in v1. If your primary computer is a Windows laptop or a Chromebook, Supanote's web app is the answer.
- You switch machines often. Supanote works on any device with a browser; TherapyDraft is tied to the Mac it's licensed on (a second seat is available but is not free).
- You need specialty templates day one. Supanote's template library is broader in v1 — intake, treatment plan, group therapy. TherapyDraft ships the four core progress-note formats and adds more per customer demand.
- You don't want to manage a ~10 GB model download. TherapyDraft ships with an in-app downloader; first run pulls the whisper and Qwen weights to your Applications Support directory. Cloud scribes skip that step.
Trying TherapyDraft without leaving Supanote
If you're already on Supanote, the low-risk switch test is: run TherapyDraft on 10 sessions during the free-trial period while continuing to use Supanote for the rest of your caseload. Compare the drafts for clinical utility and compare the minutes spent editing. The 10-session trial is unlimited otherwise — no credit card, no sales call, no re-prompt.