Microsoft Dragon Copilot vs Nabla (2026)
Nabla and Microsoft DAX, now part of Dragon Copilot, were arms in the same randomized trial, and the result favored Nabla. In Lukac and colleagues, NEJM AI, November 2025, 238 UCLA Health physicians across 14 specialties were randomized to Nabla, Microsoft DAX or usual care for two months. Nabla cut time in notes by 9.5 percent and was the only arm to meet the primary endpoint; the DAX arm reached 1.7 percent and was not statistically significant. Both improved burnout measures by about 7 percent. The purchase is wider than that result. Dragon Copilot covers nurses and radiologists as well as physicians, sits natively in Epic and reaches other EHRs through SMART on FHIR, and publishes more about its own failure modes. Nabla publishes its price and its data lifecycle and integrates across six record systems.
- Separate editions serve nurses and radiologists as well as physicians, and the nursing edition turns bedside conversation into structured flowsheet entries.
- Microsoft's documentation names its failure modes in writing, including background noise, overlapping speech, omitted findings, hallucinated details and weaker performance on accents underrepresented in training.
- The regulatory position is stated. The physician edition is UKCA marked as a Class I medical device in Great Britain, and Microsoft states it is not a medical device elsewhere.
- In the trial, Nabla cut time in notes by 9.5 percent against usual care across roughly 72,000 encounters and was the only arm to meet the primary endpoint.
- It integrates across Epic, athenahealth, Oracle Health, NextGen, Greenway and Arya, reading visit context and writing notes, diagnoses and vitals back.
- The price and data lifecycle are public: $119 a month per clinician after a 30 day trial, audio not stored by default, notes deleted after 14 days unless shortened, and no training on customer data.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Microsoft Dragon Copilot and Nabla 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 | Microsoft Dragon Copilot | Nabla |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Ambient Scribes | Ambient Scribes |
| Founded | 2025 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, United States | Paris, France |
| Website | microsoft.com | nabla.com |
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.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot
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Safety / governance
Microsoft's October release of Dragon Copilot for radiologists moves feature control into Dragon admin center, where admins can switch Chat, AI Draft and Optimization on or off and manage who has access.
Source
Nabla
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EHR / interoperability
Nabla released the first beta of @nabla/connect-sdk, a browser SDK for EHR and partner pages that embed the Nabla Connect encounter frame.
Source -
Product / capability
Nabla's Connect API now accepts Dutch for the Netherlands and for Belgium as speech languages when partners provision providers, a change applied to all earlier API versions.
Source -
Product / capability
Nabla released version 2026-08-25 of its Core API.
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.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot is the ambient clinical documentation assistant Microsoft created in March 2025 by merging DAX Copilot with Dragon Medical One, both from its 2022 acquisition of Nuance. It captures multi party, multilingual encounters and returns specialty specific draft notes, coding suggestions, clinical evidence summaries, referral letters and after visit summaries for clinician review inside the EHR.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
Nabla sells an ambient AI assistant that listens to the visit and drafts a structured clinical note, together with dictation and E/M coding suggestions, to health systems, medical groups and individual clinicians. The company reports more than 85,000 clinicians across more than 130 health organizations and more than 20 million patient encounters a year.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
Questions buyers ask
How do Microsoft Dragon Copilot and Nabla work with the EHR?
For Microsoft Dragon Copilot, the product is embedded natively there, with Android and iOS parity and an Epic nursing app path for flowsheet capture, and the web application launches through SMART on FHIR R4. A partner Developer Kit lets a record system vendor embed the whole workflow, so recording is captured and the summary delivered without clinical content leaving the EHR.
Nabla pulls patient history and visit context from the EHR, exports structured notes into EHR templates, and places vital signs, diagnoses and patient instructions into charts, flowsheets and clinical fields. The systems named are Epic, athenahealth, Oracle Health, NextGen, Greenway and Arya. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How are Microsoft Dragon Copilot and Nabla priced and sold?
Microsoft sells Dragon Copilot through its direct sales team and through Cloud Solution Provider partners, and quotes each deal individually, with a customer's existing Microsoft agreements bearing on the price.
An individual clinician can sign up online, use the product free for 30 days, and then pay $119 a month, the rate Nabla's help center states. Organizations buying for many clinicians go through Nabla's team, and group rates are quoted on request, with no group price, volume tier or enterprise unit listed. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do Microsoft Dragon Copilot and Nabla handle patient data?
Microsoft says the process meets the HIPAA deidentification standard, the GDPR standard for anonymization and Canadian guidance under PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25. The resulting data is used to improve Dragon Copilot's models, which Microsoft says are trained solely on anonymized data.
Audio is not stored by default, notes are kept for 14 days from the moment an encounter is created, and a customer can shorten that window, down to a few hours according to Nabla's French compliance page. On expiry the data leaves the application and remains only in backups, which expire seven days later. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which settings and specialties do Microsoft Dragon Copilot and Nabla cover?
For Microsoft Dragon Copilot, language support follows the product documentation. Only languages listed there are supported for speech to text and ambient summarization in a given locale, and multilingual mode must be enabled by an organization administrator before clinicians can use it.
With Nabla, customers range from individual practices to large health systems, and emergency and inpatient clinicians can document on mobile inside Epic. Nabla supports more than 35 languages, from English, Spanish and French to several Arabic dialects, Hindi, Mandarin and Haitian Creole. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers.
The trial cited is Lukac and colleagues, NEJM AI, 26 November 2025, NCT06792890. It measured time in note and burnout over two months in outpatient care at a single academic health system, with use limited to English language visits, so it does not establish note quality, coding accuracy or inpatient performance.
An earlier version of this comparison said Nabla's free tier lacked a business associate agreement; Nabla's terms make accepting its published agreement a condition of use for any customer subject to HIPAA. That statement was corrected on 13 September 2026. Microsoft quotes Dragon Copilot per deal.