Counsel Health vs Ubie (2026)
Both stand at the front door and only one of them opens it onto a clinician. Counsel Health runs physician supervised asynchronous care: the model gathers context and gives initial guidance, and a board certified physician from an in house medical group licensed in all fifty states joins the conversation when judgement is needed, which is the clearest oversight architecture among patient facing AI in this index. Ubie is a symptom checker, free and unregistered, covering more than a thousand diseases through an adaptive questionnaire built on published literature under physician supervision, with an unusually strong evidence posture for a consumer product. The difference is what the patient walks away with. Ubie tells them what might be going on and where to go. Counsel tells them what to do and takes responsibility for it, which is a different service and a different cost.
- The oversight boundary is drawn at the right place and stated plainly: the model gathers context and gives initial guidance, and a board certified physician from an in house medical group licensed across all fifty states joins when clinical judgement is required.
- It built its own record system for asynchronous care rather than bolting a chat layer onto someone else's, which is why the conversation and the medical history stay in one place.
- The clinical relationship is real, not simulated, so the patient ends up with an actual physician rather than with an agent that eventually gives up and tells them to call the office.
- Coverage is the point and it is substantiated, spanning more than a thousand diseases from an adaptive questionnaire built on a large corpus of peer reviewed literature under physician supervision.
- The evidence posture is among the strongest in the consumer facing tier of this index, with the company publishing its clinical data sources and process rather than describing them.
- It is free with no registration, which means a health system can point at it as a front door without procuring anything, and a patient can use it without an account.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Counsel Health and Ubie are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials and the regulatory record, under the AI Health Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Fact | Counsel Health | Ubie |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Patient Voice Agents | Clinical Decision Support |
| Founded | 2023 | 2017 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States | Tokyo, Japan |
| Website | counselhealth.com | ubiehealth.com |
Side by Side
Each record in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph states what the AI Health Index verified about the vendor, with the caveats attached. Generated from this pair’s live capability grades, so it moves when a grade moves.
The AI Health Index awards Counsel Health its top capability grade on AI Centrality and Autonomy and Oversight Model. Set against Ubie, Counsel Health grades higher on several axes, including Autonomy and Oversight Model, Model Supply Chain Disclosure and AI Safety and PHI Stewardship. Its thinnest published disclosure sits on AI Liability and Recourse. Grades reflect evidence the AI Health Index could verify at the last review, so a low grade records disclosure the vendor has not published rather than a capability it has been shown to lack.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
The AI Health Index awards Ubie its top capability grade on AI Centrality, Clinical and Operational Evidence and Setting and Specialty Coverage. Set against Counsel Health, Ubie grades higher on several axes, including Model and Technology Transparency, Clinical and Operational Evidence and AI Liability and Recourse. Grades reflect evidence the AI Health Index could verify at the last review, so a low grade records disclosure the vendor has not published rather than a capability it has been shown to lack.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
Questions buyers ask
Should we choose Counsel Health or Ubie?
On the axes where the AI Health Index separates them, Counsel Health grades higher on several axes, including Autonomy and Oversight Model, Model Supply Chain Disclosure and AI Safety and PHI Stewardship, and Ubie grades higher on several axes, including Model and Technology Transparency, Clinical and Operational Evidence and AI Liability and Recourse. Counsel Health leads on the greater share of scored axes, but the split means the decision turns on which constraint is binding rather than on an overall winner.
Where do Counsel Health and Ubie differ most?
The widest separation the AI Health Index records between Counsel Health and Ubie is on Clinical and Operational Evidence, where Counsel Health grades C and Ubie grades A. That axis sits in the AI Capability group, so it should carry the most weight for a buyer whose binding constraint is how much of the work the model itself is trusted to do.
Where do Counsel Health and Ubie grade the same?
The AI Health Index grades Counsel Health and Ubie the same on AI Centrality, AI Governance and Bias Disclosure and Deployment Model and Data Residency. Neither holds an advantage the index can evidence on those axes, so they should not carry weight in a selection between these two.
What have Counsel Health and Ubie not disclosed?
At the last review, at least one of Counsel Health and Ubie published thin or absent detail on AI Liability and Recourse. The AI Health Index treats an absent disclosure as a gap in the public record rather than a failure of the product, so these are the axes to get in writing during diligence instead of inferring from the grade.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Patient Voice Agents page.
These are different products for different buyers and the comparison is useful mainly for what it shows about the licensing boundary: one delivers care under physician supervision and the other explicitly does not diagnose, and any deployment that blurs that line inherits obligations neither vendor carries for you.
Ubie's consumer product collects sex, age and history without a health privacy framework attaching in the usual way, and a buyer should understand that structure before pointing patients at it. Neither publishes a bias evaluation or subgroup performance, which matters because symptom description varies with language, health literacy and culture, and a triage tool that understands some patients better than others sends the rest to the wrong place.