Plaud NotePin vs Gilbert: an honest comparison

We are often asked: "Plaud is good, right? It is that little gadget you see everywhere on LinkedIn." True. But behind the object, what is the solution really worth for a European company? Here is our comparison, no punches pulled.

Two opposite philosophies

The underlying difference is simple. Plaud is a physical device (€169 to €189) on top of which sits an annual subscription (around €250 a year), which means more than €420 in the first year, per user. Gilbert is pure software: no hardware, one account, active in two minutes at €19.90 a month.

To equip twenty people, Plaud costs more than €8,000 in the first year in hardware and subscriptions alone, before the logistics of managing the devices.

The key differences

Hosting

• Plaud: AWS in the United States, subject to the Cloud Act
• Gilbert: OVHcloud in France, SecNumCloud certified, ISO 27001

GDPR compliance

• Plaud: data outside the EU
• Gilbert: data in France, never used to train third-party models

Accuracy in French

• Plaud: 98% on Whisper, a general-purpose model covering 112 languages
• Gilbert: 98.2% on models trained specifically on French legal, medical and financial language

Remote meetings

• Plaud: no native support for Teams or Zoom
• Gilbert: native integration with Teams, Zoom and Meet

AI architecture

• Plaud: dependent on OpenAI, Claude or Gemini, at your choice
• Gilbert: proprietary HERMES/ECHO/CHRONOS/MODELIS architecture, no Big Tech dependency

Who it is for

• Plaud: individual, mobile, personal use
• Gilbert: companies, public bodies, regulated sectors

The one place Plaud genuinely wins

Let us be honest: Plaud shines in the room. Its four MEMS microphones capture up to five metres, with fifty hours of battery life. For a journalist or a field consultant running interviews far from any screen, the physical object makes real sense.

Outside that specific use case, its limits show quickly.

Sovereignty: the non-negotiable point

For law firms, healthcare organisations, local authorities and public bodies, Plaud's hosting on AWS in San Francisco is often incompatible with their GDPR obligations. The American Cloud Act potentially gives US authorities access to any data hosted on US infrastructure, even from Europe.

Gilbert hosts exclusively in France. No data leaves the territory. No third-party model is trained on your conversations.

Verdict

Plaud is a fine tool for individual, mobile use. Gilbert is built for organisations that cannot gamble with the sovereignty of their data.

They are not the same product, and for the great majority of European companies the choice is clear.