Plaud Note or Notus: an honest comparison.

What the Plaud Note does very well

Plaud created this category, and its lead is deserved. The company claims more than two million users since 2023 and holds 4.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot across over 2,000 reviews. This is not a launch: it is a mature product, three hardware generations in.

Three things in particular, where we do not claim to be ahead:

• Availability. The Plaud Note is sold online and in stores — Fnac, Darty, Boulanger, LDLC, Amazon. You can have it tomorrow.
• Language coverage. Plaud advertises up to 112 languages depending on the model, using Whisper for transcription and GPT-4o for summaries. Notus focuses on French and English first.
• The ecosystem. Three form factors — Note, Note Pro, NotePin — over 10,000 summary templates, accessories, and a support team that has had three years to settle in.

Two more things show up only in use. Capture first: the Plaud Note carries two MEMS microphones and a conduction sensor, which keeps it intelligible at three metres across a meeting room — terrain where many recorders give up. Then the form factor: the thickness of a bank card, which slips into a wallet and sits on a table without anyone taking offence. That design detail changes how a recorder is actually used.

Plaud has also done the retail work. Being able to handle the object in a store, buy it with a right of withdrawal exercised on the spot and bring it back if it does not suit, counts for a lot on a €169 product. We do not offer that.

If your need is immediate, multilingual, or you want a product whose reliability tens of thousands of users have already demonstrated, the decision is made and this page can stop here.

The comparison table

Price in detail — including where we cost more

Comparing €169 to €136 means nothing until you look at the subscription. Here is the real three-year cost, in the two most common configurations.

The point worth stating plainly: our subscription costs more than Plaud's. Solo at €19 a month comes to €228 a year, where Plaud's Pro Plan is €110.99 a year. If you need a paid subscription, Plaud is cheaper, and the gap is clear.

Our advantage rests on two things, and nothing else. First the free tier: 50 hours a month against 300 minutes at Plaud — ten times more. For most uses that is enough and the subscription question never comes up. Second, the Founders offer: the first 200 pre-orders get Solo included, and Pro at the Solo price for life. Beyond those 200 units, compare the subscriptions without giving us any favour.

Where your recordings go

This is the one structural difference between the two products, and the one a software update cannot close.

An AI recorder is not a standalone object: it is the entry point of a processing chain. Audio leaves the device, passes through a transcription service, then through a language model that writes the summary, before being stored somewhere. Each of those steps can sit in a different jurisdiction, and it is rarely printed on the box.

Here are the two chains, side by side.

Plaud documents its own reliance on Whisper and GPT-4o: two models from OpenAI, a US company. Your meetings therefore pass through infrastructure outside the European Union. That is neither unlawful nor hidden — it is simply a fact worth knowing before you record a board meeting, a performance review or a medical consultation.

At Notus, the summary is produced by Mistral Large, the model from Mistral AI, a French company based in Paris. The servers that receive and store recordings are in Paris too. Email goes through Brevo, also French.

We will not claim the chain is entirely French, however: transcription and speaker separation run through pyannote.ai, whose jurisdiction we do not assert here because we have not established it publicly. We would rather say so than imply otherwise — that kind of approximation is precisely what this page holds against the market.

The point that matters: for the link in the chain where artificial intelligence actually reads the content of your meetings and writes a synthesis of it, Notus uses a European model on European servers, where Plaud uses an American model on American servers.

If you record internal meetings with nothing sensitive in them, this difference will not change your day. If you handle health data, HR files or legal matters, or if your organisation has a data protection officer who asks questions, it becomes the deciding criterion.

And if you work in French?

Plaud covers French among its 112 languages, and does it properly. But covering a language and being designed in it are not the same thing. A measurable volume of searches every month asks for the Plaud Note manual in French — a sign that documentation and support do not always keep up.

Notus is designed and written in French, with French-language support, by a French company. That is a modest advantage if you are comfortable in English, and a real convenience otherwise.

There is a second, less obvious effect. A summary is not a translation: it is a rewrite. A model renders the turns of phrase, the courtesies and the unsaid parts of a meeting according to what it saw most during training. We chose a French model for that step; we do not claim it mechanically produces better summaries in French, but it is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

So which one?

There is no wrong choice here, only two different trade-offs: immediate availability on one side, data location on the other. Ours only becomes obvious if the second matters to you.

Frequently asked questions

Can I cancel my pre-order?

Yes. The €50 deposit is refundable until shipping, under our terms of sale. Once the product ships, the sale becomes final and the statutory right of withdrawal applies under the usual conditions.

Why is delivery set for the first quarter of 2027?

Because the product is still being industrialised. That date is indicative, and we would rather announce it as such than promise a deadline production could not hold.

What happens after the first 200 units?

The Founders offer — Solo included, Pro at the Solo price for life — is reserved for the first edition. Beyond that, list prices apply, and our subscription remains more expensive than Plaud's. The 50-hour monthly free tier does not change.

Is a subscription required for the device to work?

No. The free tier is included with the object and covers recording, transcription and automatic summaries, up to 50 hours a month with 30 days of storage. The subscription lifts those limits; it does not unlock the basic function.

Do participants have to be told they are being recorded?

Yes, and that holds for any recorder, Plaud or Notus alike. Informing participants before recording is an obligation, not a courtesy. In France, the CNIL sets out the conditions that apply in a professional context.