Plaud now sells three objects that share an app and split a job. Two are cards. One is a pin. Buyers keep asking which to order as if they were sizes of the same tool. They are not. The Note Pro is what you buy if capture is the reason you are here. The Note is what you buy if money is. The NotePin is what you buy if you will not carry a card.
What the extra money is for
The Pro’s public specification is four MEMS microphones plus a voice-pickup unit and a 5 m claimed pickup, against two mics and 3 m on the Note (Plaud hardware comparison; Plaud EU, Note Pro). That is a meeting-table difference, not a firmware difference. The 0.95-inch AMOLED behind Gorilla Glass is the other hardware reason: recording state is a screen, not an LED colour you memorised.
As of shipping, Plaud’s U.S. list is $189 for the Pro and $159 for the Note. Thirty dollars buys the array and the display. It does not buy extra storage, a different transcriber, or a local ASR option. Both cards still record phone calls on a hardware switch. Both still dump WAV or MP3. Both still live on Plaud’s cloud for the transcript.
| Cost | |
|---|---|
| Price | $189 |
| Plan | Starter 300 min, or Pro $99.99/yr |
| Year-one on the encoded plan | $288.99 if you pay for twelve months of the encoded plan. Not the ranking column. |
| Capture | |
| Microphones | 4 |
| Capture mode | Press to record |
| Audio out | None |
| Battery (active capture) | 30 h — 30 h in Enhance mode at the full 5 m pickup range; 50 h only in Endurance mode, which drops the range to 3 m. |
| Speech recognition | Cloud |
| Language model | Cloud |
| Body | |
| Form factor | Recorder |
| Weight | 30 g |
| Materials | Aluminum alloy & Gorilla Glass |
| Charging case | Not published |
| Recording indicator | Yes |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth, Wi-Fi |
| Companion app | iOS, Android, Web |
| Data export | Yes |
The battery sentence
Plaud will keep saying 50 hours. The EU page is the correction: 50 hours is Endurance, which cuts pickup to 3 m — the Note’s range. Enhance, at the 5 m the Pro exists for, is 30 hours, the same continuous figure as the Note. Print 30 unless you are also printing the mode. A ranking that scored the Pro’s battery on the headline would be scoring a device you have turned into its cheaper sibling.
The pin is not in this race
The NotePin costs the Note’s money and loses the VPU, the call-recording path and ten hours. It gains 16.6 g and four mounts. If the objection to the cards is “I will leave it on the desk,” the pin is the product. If the objection is “I cannot hear the far end,” the Pro is the product. Crossing those sentences is how Plaud’s line looks like a muddle.
Software is shared. Intelligence scores will look similar across the three, and should. Capture will not. Value will not, once you add Plaud Pro at $99.99 a year (or $17.99 a month) on top of hardware that is useless as a daily driver on 300 Starter minutes. Year-one cost is on methodology. The cards are still cheaper than most wearables here. They are not cheap once you count the plan the templates require.
Buy the Pro for rooms. Buy the Note for desks and calls. Buy the NotePin only if wearability is the constraint you actually have. Plaud will try to sell you all three. The specification tables already say no.