Limbic vs Wysa (2026)
Two British conversational mental health products, and the difference is what happens after the conversation. Limbic is a front door to a service. Limbic Access supports patient self referral and triage into talking therapies, classifying presenting problems so the service knows who is coming and where to route them. It is a regulated medical device, holding Class IIa certification under the UK conformity regime, which puts it in a different category from almost everything else in this index. Its evidence is the strongest in the pairing: a multi site study in Nature Medicine with named authors, published on its own research pages. Wysa is the care itself, or a layer of it. It delivers cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation, dialectical behavior techniques and mindfulness through text chat, free at the consumer tier with a paid premium layer, and separately sold to employers and health services. It holds Breakthrough Device Designation granted in 2022 for an agent serving adults with chronic musculoskeletal pain and depression, which it describes accurately and others routinely misdescribe. Both publish what the product is not for, which is the harder half to publish, and both leave the same gap: the threshold at which the system stops and a person takes over.
- The job is getting people into a service: self referral, triage and a classification the service can act on, rather than a therapeutic conversation.
- It carries device certification under the regime that governs it, and a multi site study in Nature Medicine with authors named.
- It publishes a de-identification operation rather than a policy: identifiable information is stripped from the referral record as a processing step.
- The job is support between appointments, or where there are no appointments: therapeutic technique delivered by chat, free at the consumer tier.
- Anonymity is built into the architecture rather than promised, on a certified privacy management system.
- The limits are published plainly and in more than one place, including what the product is not for, which matters most for anything a person in distress can open at 3am.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Limbic and Wysa 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
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 Limbic its top capability grade on AI Centrality, Clinical and Operational Evidence and FDA and Regulatory Status. Set against Wysa, Limbic grades higher on several axes, including Model Supply Chain Disclosure, Clinical and Operational Evidence and FDA and Regulatory Status. Its thinnest published disclosure sits on Commercial Transparency. 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, September 2026
The AI Health Index awards Wysa its top capability grade on AI Centrality. Set against Limbic, Wysa grades higher on Deployment Model and Data Residency and Commercial Transparency. Its thinnest published disclosure sits on Model Supply Chain Disclosure. 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, September 2026
Questions buyers ask
Should we choose Limbic or Wysa?
On the axes where the AI Health Index separates them, Limbic grades higher on several axes, including Model Supply Chain Disclosure, Clinical and Operational Evidence and FDA and Regulatory Status, and Wysa grades higher on Deployment Model and Data Residency and Commercial Transparency. Limbic 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 Limbic and Wysa differ most?
The widest separation the AI Health Index records between Limbic and Wysa is on Model Supply Chain Disclosure, where Limbic grades C and Wysa grades D. 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 Limbic and Wysa grade the same?
The AI Health Index grades Limbic and Wysa the same on several axes, including AI Centrality, Autonomy and Oversight Model and Model and Technology Transparency. 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 Limbic and Wysa not disclosed?
At the last review, at least one of Limbic and Wysa published thin or absent detail on Model Supply Chain Disclosure and Commercial Transparency. 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 Behavioral Health AI page.
Both are conversational products meeting people who may be in crisis, so the escalation question is the one to settle before anything else. Each states a boundary and neither publishes the threshold behind it: what the system does when a conversation turns, who is reached, and how fast. Ask both for it in writing.
Limbic publishes no price at all, and its integration into the patient management system a therapies service runs is real and nowhere specified, so ask which systems and by what method. Wysa's published compliance covers four named jurisdictions with unusual candour about its limits, and its deployment is far wider than the indication its Breakthrough designation covers, so read the designation as what it is: an engagement with a regulator, not a clearance. Neither names any party in its model supply chain, and Wysa names none at all on a product it describes as combining scripted content with a language model.