--- title: "SumizAI vs BastionGPT" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-bastiongpt.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a BastionGPT alternative? SumizAI and BastionGPT side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "bastiongpt", "alternative to BastionGPT"] --- # SumizAI vs BastionGPT Looking for a BastionGPT alternative? SumizAI and BastionGPT side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What BastionGPT is BastionGPT is a HIPAA-compliant AI assistant and digital medical scribe built specifically for healthcare, created by Bastion Intelligence — a Microsoft Partner — running models like GPT, Claude Opus, and Gemini under the hood in a secure, clinical-grade interface. This is a tool from an entirely different category than consumer AI notepads: its audience is therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, physicians, and other medical staff. The key feature for therapists is background video-session recording during a patient conversation — the system distinguishes speakers (therapist vs. patient) and produces a transcript in a HIPAA-compliant environment, meaning the content never goes to an insecure external service and doesn't violate doctor-patient confidentiality. That directly addresses a real problem: manual note-taking during a therapy session distracts attention and degrades the quality of contact with the patient. A BAA (Business Associate Agreement) included on every plan is a formal US legal requirement for tools processing health data — lacking one would disqualify BastionGPT from legitimate use in clinical practice. Patient data is never shared with third parties for model training, and private, healthcare-specific AI deployments along with encryption, strict access controls, and short data-retention windows protect PHI (Protected Health Information). A 4.8/5 average rating across Capterra and Software Advice, plus approval by the American Psychological Association's review team for presentation at its 2025 conference, is an unusually strong quality signal for a tool in this category — suggesting industry leaders recognize the tool's compliance with safety and quality standards, not just vendor marketing. More than 10,000 healthcare organizations using BastionGPT points to a mature product with a real institutional customer base, not an early-stage experimental tool — relevant when choosing a system that will store sensitive ai notes from therapy sessions across years of clinical practice, where losing or leaking that ai notes archive would carry far graver consequences than for ordinary jottings. Compared to plain general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT, BastionGPT costs more and offers less "general" flexibility — but that's a deliberate trade-off for regulatory compliance that an ordinary consumer chatbot doesn't provide and legally cannot provide in the context of medical data. Beyond the scribe function, BastionGPT also generates reports, agendas, and progress documentation — features that go beyond just creating ai notes from a session, covering the whole of clinical paperwork that consumes a significant share of therapists' and physicians' work time unrelated to direct patient care. It's worth highlighting that choosing three different language-model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) instead of building the whole platform on one model gives BastionGPT flexibility in picking the best tool for a specific clinical task — say, one model for speech transcription, another for generating structured medical documentation — instead of the compromise that comes from relying on a single provider's limitations. For small private practices where the therapist works alone, with no IT or legal department to negotiate data-processing agreements with every vendor separately, a ready-made BAA and pre-built HIPAA compliance eliminate an entire layer of legal work that would otherwise have to precede rolling out any AI tool processing patient data, including simple session ai notes. In short, BastionGPT is a specialized, HIPAA-compliant AI tool for mental-health and general medicine, combining a medical-scribe function with secure storage of session these notes — it doesn't compete with consumer notepads, because it addresses an entirely different, far more regulated market segment. **Key facts** - Price: Paid - License: Proprietary - Origin: United States ## What SumizAI is A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk. A vault is a directory holding `base.md`, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a `notes/` folder with one `.md` file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist. The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used. ## Where they differ - BastionGPT is a place to have the conversation. SumizAI is not a chatbot — the conversation is the input, not the product. What comes out of it is a `.md` file with a title, a place in `base.md` and a duplicate check against the notes already in the vault. If you only want to talk to a model, you do not need SumizAI. - BastionGPT is paid software. Compare the two numbers directly: SumizAI is one dollar a month, one plan, and your AI provider bills you separately for the model you chose. - AlternativeTo's description of BastionGPT does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard `.md` files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - BastionGPT runs in the browser. SumizAI is a desktop and mobile application, and on the desktop the vault is a folder on your own disk rather than a document in someone's cloud. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-bastiongpt.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-bastiongpt.html)