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. 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
Select any grade to read the note behind it.
Product updates
The latest logged changes from each vendor, newest first, each linked to its source.
Wysa
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Security / compliance
Wysa published Global Privacy Policy V7.2.2 and UK Privacy Policy V4.2.1, removing a sentence that said personal data did not include publicly available, anonymized or aggregated information.
Source
Each vendor in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph opens the AI Health Index profile of the vendor: what the product is, who buys it and what it does.
Clinical AI for mental health services, London based and founded in 2017. Limbic Access is a conversational assessment and triage assistant that supports patient self referral and classifies the eight common mental health disorders treated by NHS Talking Therapies, at a stated 93 percent classification accuracy; in January 2023 it gained Class IIa medical device certification under the United Kingdom conformity regime, which Limbic says made it the first AI mental health chatbot to hold that status.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
Conversational artificial intelligence delivering cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation, dialectical behavior techniques and mindfulness through text chat. Founded 2016 by Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vemati.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
Questions buyers ask
How do Limbic and Wysa work with the EHR?
A self referral and assessment tool feeding a talking therapies service has to reach that service's patient management system, and Limbic's FAQ says it is interoperable with a number of record systems and can operate alongside patient management systems, so staff no longer update patient information from intakes and referrals by hand.
With Wysa, the consumer application needs no integration at all, which is a legitimate architectural position and part of why it reaches the scale it does. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do Limbic and Wysa handle patient data?
In Limbic's case, the company states that it is not the end destination for patient data and works under the data policies of the commissioning provider organization, which describes a processor relationship accurately and shows where the controlling rules come from.
For Wysa, the certification is the uncommon part. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which settings and specialties do Limbic and Wysa cover?
With Limbic, the setting is psychological therapy services, and the claim is precise rather than general: the eight disorder categories the national talking therapies program treats, across self referral triage, assessment, support between sessions and caseload management, with an ambient scribe added to the caseload assistant.
In Wysa's case, a pediatric line is sold, a national platform in Singapore serves teenagers and young adults, and a funded study is adapting the intervention for adolescent girls in rural India. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What evidence is published for Limbic and Wysa?
For Limbic, deployment corroborates rather than substitutes: assessments for more than 650,000 patients across a large share of English services.
With Wysa, an independent peer reviewed clinical trial published in JMIR found the tool effective for chronic pain and associated depression and anxiety, more effective than standard orthopedic care and comparable to in person psychological counseling. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
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.