The usual Chartnote alternative is an ambient AI scribe: a tool that listens to the visit itself instead of waiting for you to dictate. Chartnote is a dictation-and-dot-phrase tool with metered AI note credits layered on top. If you’re bumping into its monthly minutes or credit caps, an unlimited ambient scribe such as the AI Medical Scribe by Patient Square is the standard next step.
That’s the short version. The longer version is about a real distinction in how the note gets made, and it’s worth getting right before you move, because Chartnote is a better deal than most people leaving it admit. If you’d rather see the ambient side running on one of your own visit types first,
Key takeaways
- Chartnote is dictation plus dot phrases, with AI scribe credits metered by tier. Third-party listings put its free plan around 15 minutes of dictation a month.
- A clinician seeing 15 patients a day generates roughly 300 notes a month. Credit-metered plans make you ration which visits get help.
- Ambient capture removes the retelling step: the visit conversation is the input, and a structured SOAP draft lands about 2 minutes after the visit ends.
- Practice Copilot starts at $79/clinician/month (annual Assist plan), unlimited notes, no credits. Chartnote stays the better fit for low-volume and genuinely-free use.
Chartnote is a dictation tool with a scribe bolted on
Chartnote’s own positioning is “AI Scribe, Medical Dictation, Snippets,” and the order matters. The core product is medical dictation (you speak, it transcribes into the note field) plus smart snippets, its version of dot phrases that expand a short abbreviation into a formatted block. A Chrome extension lets you dictate straight into any web-based EHR, which is genuinely useful and the reason a lot of clinicians install it in the first place.
The AI scribe part is newer and metered. As of this writing, Chartnote’s plans page gates AI note generation behind monthly credits on most tiers. A third-party pricing breakdown from March 2025 listed the ladder at a free Basic tier (about 15 minutes of dictation and a small stack of AI note credits), a Premium tier at $4.99 a month, Professional at $15.99, and a Max tier at $99.99 with unlimited dictation and AI notes. We’ve seen other listings quote slightly different credit counts, so treat those numbers as directional and read Chartnote’s plans page before you decide anything based on them.
None of that is a criticism. It’s a freemium dictation product priced like one. The question is whether metered dictation matches how your clinic actually runs.
Where the credit math runs out
Here’s the arithmetic that sends people searching for alternatives. Take a Tuesday with 18 booked patients. If you dictate even a third of those notes at 90 seconds each, that’s 27 minutes of dictation, more than the free tier’s listed monthly allowance, gone before lunch on day one. AI note credits burn the same way: 15 credits against 300-plus monthly visits means you’re choosing which 5% of patients get an AI-drafted note.
| Your volume | Notes/month (approx.) | What a metered free tier covers | What unlimited means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 patients/day, part-time | ~120 | A few days, then you’re typing | Every visit, no rationing |
| 15 patients/day | ~300 | Roughly 5% of visits | Every visit |
| 22 patients/day | ~440 | A rounding error | Every visit |
The counterargument is real: Chartnote’s paid tiers are cheap, and the $99.99 Max tier removes the meters entirely per that same third-party listing. If dictation is the workflow you want, that tier is a fair price for it. The switch decision usually isn’t about price at all. It’s about the next section.
Once you’ve run your own numbers, the useful comparison is a week of each. What’s on each Practice Copilot plan is public, so you can do the math before talking to anyone.
Dictation still makes you tell the visit twice
This is the actual wedge, and it has nothing to do with credits. With dictation, the patient leaves and then you narrate what just happened: history, exam, assessment, plan, out loud, from memory, into a microphone. You’ve now conducted the visit twice. Dot phrases shave the typing but not the composing. Multiply by 18 patients and you’ve spent a real hour of your day being your own court reporter.
Ambient capture deletes that step. The visit conversation is the input. You get consent, you talk to the patient like you normally would, and the draft assembles itself from what was actually said in the room. Nobody performs a recap into a phone between patients. Our comparison of ambient AI versus dictation walks through where each method wins, and the wider dictation and transcription software roundup covers the rest of that market if you want to shop the category properly.
Dictation keeps one honest advantage: control. You compose every sentence, so the draft never surprises you. Some clinicians, especially those with terse, highly templated notes, prefer that. If that’s you, skip ahead to the “when Chartnote is better” section, because an ambient scribe solves a problem you may not have.
What you get from Patient Square instead
The AI Medical Scribe by Patient Square is the ambient scribe module inside Practice Copilot. It listens during the visit and hands back a structured SOAP note, ICD-10 suggestions, and a prescription draft, ready to review and sign about two minutes after the visit. Both of those extras are drafts for you to confirm, not a coding engine and not a script that transmits anywhere. You stay the author of the chart.
The plan mechanics are the opposite of credit metering. Every plan includes unlimited visits and notes with no per-note metering, EHR-ready export (PDF · HL7 · FHIR), a live transcript as you speak, and specialty-aware templates, ready out of the box. Practice Copilot starts at $79 per clinician per month on the annual Assist plan; the Copilot tier at $119 a month annual adds a bundled AI EHR and WhatsApp messaging if you’d rather stop pasting notes into a separate system altogether.
On the trust side: safeguards are HIPAA compliant, a BAA is available for every customer, a SOC 2 Type II audit is in progress, and visit audio is never stored (processed in memory, discarded once the note is drafted). The full posture is on our security page.
We think the honest way to frame the price gap is this: Chartnote sells you documentation help by the minute, and we sell the whole documentation job at a flat rate. Cheaper per month isn’t the same as cheaper per note once volume shows up.
When Chartnote is the better fit
Plenty of cases, and we’d rather you pick correctly than pick us.
Chartnote wins when your documentation load is genuinely light: a few visits a day, a part-time telehealth panel, or a side practice where a free tier plus occasional credits covers the month. It wins if dot phrases are load-bearing in your workflow and you mostly need faster text expansion inside a web EHR. It wins on raw entry price; per third-party listings, its cheapest paid tier costs less than a sandwich. And it wins if you simply aren’t ready for ambient recording in the room, since dictation never captures the patient’s voice at all, which sidesteps the consent conversation entirely.
If two or more of those describe you, stay. Revisit when your volume changes.
How to run the switch test in a week
Don’t decide from pricing pages, ours included. Pick your five messiest recurring visit types. Run them through your current Chartnote workflow on Monday and Tuesday and time the full loop: dictation, dot-phrase cleanup, paste, sign. Run the same visit types ambiently on Wednesday through Friday and time the review-and-sign loop instead. The 7-day free trial exists so you can do exactly this on real patients, and the per-plan breakdown tells you what you’d pay if the math wins. If you want a guided version of that week,