10 Best Character AI Alternatives in 2026

TL;DR

• Character.AI hasn't shut down yet. The app and paid plans keep working while the company looks for a buyer, and the sale is expected to close by early December 2026.
• There are character chat apps that serve as direct replacements. These apps have public libraries of characters made by other users and let you create your own, the same way Character.AI does.
• If you use Character.AI for companionship, consider AI companion apps. These apps, with a single AI character, remember more about you and create a more personal experience than general character chat apps.
• Most alternatives are for adults only. Character.AI removed open-ended chat for users under 18 in 2025, and most of the apps below require you to be 18 or older.
• Overchat AI is the best for creating images and videos with your characters, because a character you create once can be used in every new scene.

Is Character.AI shutting down?

Character.AI hasn't shut down, but it may close by the end of 2026. Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12, 2026, to sell the company through a court-supervised auction. If no buyer takes over the platform, Character.AI will be wound down.

The future is still up in the air for Character.AI, but it may not be as bleak as it initially seemed. In fact, the company has already received its first offer from Disney, which agreed to pay $20 million for a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's technology and some of its patents. But that deal doesn't include the app or user chats, so it's uncertain what will happen to the platform if the deal goes through.

Buyers can still place bids until November 20, 2026, so there's still time left for a better deal to come through that will save the company. Character.AI expects the sale to close by the end of November or in early December.

For now, the app and paid subscriptions are still working. The billing hasn't changed either. If Character.AI doesn't load for you right now, the cause is most likely a temporary outage, since the service is still running.

Best Character AI alternatives at a glance

The table below compares all 10 best Character AI replacements at a glance.

1. Janitor AI — best free Character AI alternative

Janitor AI is a web platform for chatting with user-generated AI characters. Jan Zoltkowski launched it in 2023, and it reached its first million users in just 17 days. In 2026, Janitor AI reported 2.5 million daily users and more than 15 million users in total.

Of all the apps we've researched, Janitor AI works the most like Character.AI. You browse a library of millions of characters sorted by tags like Anime or Villain. You can chat with characters other people made or create your own character.

Janitor is free to use, but there are some limitations. If you're on the free plan, you get unlimited chats powered by JanitorLLM — a proprietary AI model created by Janitor — with a context window of about 9,000 tokens. This is essentially the memory limit of your character (for context, many modern AI models have a context window of 1M tokens, so 9,000 definitely isn't enough for long chats). If you want to upgrade that, you can do it with the janitor+ subscription, which makes the context five times longer and adds monthly messages on stronger models. You can also connect another model, such as DeepSeek, with your own API key.

Janitor AI is for adults only. Users from the UK, Australia and Brazil also have to verify their age with a face scan or an ID.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Unlimited free chats

✅ Millions of characters made by other users

✅ You can connect your own model with an API key

Cons:

❌ The free model has a short memory

❌ Not available for users under 18

2. Talkie — best for voice chats with AI characters

Talkie is an AI character chat app from MiniMax, a Chinese AI company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026. Talkie launched internationally in June 2023 and quickly became one of the most popular AI apps in the US. In the first half of 2024, it was even the 4th most downloaded app in the US, ahead of Character.AI itself.

The main thing that sets Talkie apart from other character chat apps is voice. Characters reply with voice messages, and if you create your own character, you can give it a custom voice. If you want to call a character, you'll need the paid Talkie+ plan.

Talkie is free to use on the web, but you'll see ads. If you're on iPhone, look for Talkie Lab in the App Store, since the original Talkie app was removed from the US App Store in December 2024. Users have to be at least 16, and 16 and 17-year-olds need a parent's permission.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Characters speak with their own voices

✅ Open to users from 16

✅ Free on the web

Cons:

❌ Ads on the free plan

❌ Voice calls are paid

3. PolyBuzz — best for anime characters

PolyBuzz is a character chat platform with more than 20 million user-generated characters. Its library is sorted by tags such as Anime or OC, and the home page also has short interactive dramas.

PolyBuzz is especially popular in Asia. In August 2026, it was the 3rd AI app in South Korea by total time spent. On average, its users spent 13.5 hours a month in the app, more than in any other AI app.

If you're moving from Character.AI, PolyBuzz is one of the few apps that can import characters saved from it. Besides chat, PolyBuzz has a built-in image generator for character avatars.

PolyBuzz is free to use with ads and the standard model. If you want to remove ads and get models with longer memory, you'll need one of the paid plans.

PolyBuzz is available only to users aged 18 and older. Its iPhone app disappeared from the App Store in October 2026, so for now you can use it on the web and on Android.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Huge library of anime characters

✅ Imports characters from Character.AI

Cons:

❌ No iPhone app right now

❌ Not available for users under 18

4. Overchat AI — best for creating images and videos with your characters

Overchat AI is an all-in-one AI platform that brings together AI models from different companies, from chatbots to video generators, in one subscription. For people coming from Character.AI, its most interesting feature is Characters, which lets you see your characters in pictures and videos.

A character in Overchat AI is a visual identity that you create once and then use in any image or video. To create one, you upload one to five photos of the same person and give the character a name and a short description. For example, we created a character named Arlo from a single photo of a man with curly red hair and a mustard sweater.

From these photos, Overchat AI builds a face reference grid and a full-body reference of the character, which the models then use every time they draw it. The character is saved in Characters, where you can also find public characters shared by other users in the Explore tab.

After that, you can attach the character to any image or video generation. Right after we created Arlo, Overchat AI put him into new scenes in the Image Generator:

Every image is saved to My Media, so you can take it further into other tools on the platform, for example, to animate it with a video model or upscale it.

For roleplay and story writing, Overchat AI also has chat with the latest AI models, including:

• GPT-6.1 Sol
• Claude Opus 5.5
• Gemini 4 Argon
• Grok 4.7

There's no library of ready-made chat characters in Overchat AI, so to roleplay, you describe the character you want in the chat, and the model plays it.

Price: the first three characters are free, and each new character after that costs 100 credits. Credits come with the free plan and every subscription:

Pros:

✅ One character works in every image and video

✅ Chatbots and video models in one subscription

✅ Three free characters

Cons:

❌ No library of ready-made chat characters

❌ Characters work in images and videos, but not in chat

5. Kindroid — best for a customizable AI companion

Kindroid is an AI companion app where you create your own characters, called Kins, and set up their backstory and appearance in detail. Jerry Meng launched it in 2023, and the app has passed 4 million downloads since then.

A common problem with character chat apps is that characters forget what happened a few dozen messages ago. Kindroid solves this with several layers of memory:

• a backstory of the character
• key memories that you write yourself
• a long-term memory that the app fills in from your chats

On top of that, a Kin can keep a journal with up to 500 entries.

Kindroid also has voice and video calls, as well as group chats with several Kins.

Kindroid's free plan is only a preview: you get 50 messages, after which you can only read your old chats. So in practice, Kindroid is a paid app. It's available only to adults.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Detailed control over the character

✅ Long-term memory and journals

✅ Voice and video calls

Cons:

❌ No real free plan

❌ No public library of characters

6. Nomi AI — best for long-term memory

Nomi AI is an AI companion app from Glimpse.ai, a small company from Baltimore. Alex Cardinell founded it in 2023, and in early 2026 the company still had seven full-time employees and no outside investors. By then, more than a million people had tried the app.

Memory is the main reason people choose Nomi. Each Nomi has a short-term and a long-term memory, and you can see what it remembers about you in Mind Maps. Nomis can also send voice messages and selfies.

On a subscription, you can create up to 10 Nomis and put several of them in one group chat. If you're on the free plan, you get a limited number of messages and two images a day, and each message can be up to 400 characters long. Nomi AI is for users aged 18 and older.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Strong long-term memory

✅ Group chats with several characters

Cons:

❌ Short messages on the free plan

❌ No public library of characters

7. Replika — best for emotional support

Replika is an AI companion app from Luka, Inc., launched by Eugenia Kuyda in 2017. It's one of the oldest AI companion apps, and its website counts more than 42 million users worldwide.

In 2026, the company rebuilt Replika from the ground up as an AI friend for everyday life. Replika remembers the people in your life, your plans and your goals, and it can suggest things to do based on them. You can also talk to it in voice and video calls and show it what you see through the camera.

Replika has one companion per account and no library of characters, so it suits people who want a supportive friend more than people who want to roleplay with many characters. The app is available on iOS and Android for users aged 18 and older.

Price: free, paid plans from $7.99/month or $49.99/year.

Pros:

✅ Remembers your life, plans and goals

✅ Video calls with the camera

Cons:

❌ Only one character per account

❌ No roleplay with different characters

8. NovelAI — best for writing stories with AI

NovelAI is a web app for writing stories with AI and generating anime images. Anlatan launched it in 2021. Today, its story model is based on GLM 4.6, an open model from the Chinese company Zhipu AI, and the Opus plan also includes Xialong, a version of this model fine-tuned for fiction.

NovelAI works differently from character chat apps. Instead of chatting with a character, you write a story together with the AI, and the Lorebook keeps the details about your characters and world, so the model doesn't forget them in a long story. Stories are encrypted on NovelAI's servers.

In May 2026, NovelAI cancelled AetherRoom, its planned app for chatting with characters, so NovelAI remains a tool for writers. If you want to try it, the free trial includes 50 text generations and 30 images. NovelAI is available only to users aged 18 and older.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Strong model for fiction writing

✅ Lorebook keeps long stories consistent

✅ Anime image generation in the same app

Cons:

❌ No chat with characters

❌ The free trial is short

9. AI Dungeon — best for text adventure games

AI Dungeon is a text adventure game in which AI narrates the story and reacts to everything you write. It started as a hackathon project by Nick Walton, and AI Dungeon 2 came out in December 2019. Today the game is developed by Walton's company Latitude, which raised a $3.3 million seed round in 2021.

AI Dungeon is closer to a role-playing game than to a chat. You pick one of thousands of scenarios made by the community or write your own, and the AI plays every character in the story. Story Cards keep the details about characters and places, and several people can play one story together in multiplayer.

AI Dungeon is free to play without ads on its own models, but on the free plan, the AI remembers only the last 4,000 tokens of the story (roughly 3,000 words). Paid plans make this memory longer and add credits for stronger models. AI Dungeon is open to users from 13, and its mature features are available only to adults.

Price:

Pros:

✅ Free plan without ads

✅ Open to users from 13

✅ Multiplayer stories

Cons:

❌ Short memory on the free plan

❌ Not built for one-on-one chats with a character

10. SillyTavern — best for running your own models

SillyTavern is a free, open-source app that you install on your own computer and use in a browser to chat with characters through any AI model you connect. It started in February 2023 as a fork of TavernAI, and the project now has more than 300 contributors and about 35,000 stars on GitHub.

SillyTavern doesn't have its own model. You connect a model through an API key, for example from OpenAI or OpenRouter, or run an open model on your own computer, in which case chatting costs nothing. Characters are stored as character cards in PNG or JSON files, so you can import characters made for other apps.

SillyTavern is built for power users. You'll need a bit of technical knowledge to install it, and the settings cover everything from prompts to World Info, which stores facts about your world. In return, you get full control over the model and the content.

Price: free. You pay only for the model API you connect, or nothing if you run a model on your own computer.

Pros:

✅ Free and open source

✅ Works with any model

✅ Imports character cards from other apps

Cons:

❌ Needs installation and setup

❌ No public library of characters

FAQ

What is the best Character AI alternative?

Janitor AI is the closest Character AI alternative: it has a library of millions of characters made by users and a free plan with unlimited chats. Overchat AI is the best alternative for creating images and videos with your characters, since a character you create once can be used in every generation.

Is there a free Character AI alternative?

Yes. Janitor AI gives unlimited free chats with its own model, and AI Dungeon has a free plan without ads. SillyTavern is free and open source, and chatting in it costs nothing if you run an open model on your own computer.

Is there a Character AI alternative with no filter?

Janitor AI and SillyTavern have the fewest content restrictions. Janitor AI allows mature roleplay for users aged 18 and older, and SillyTavern only follows the rules of the AI model you connect to it.

What happens to my Character.AI chats if the app shuts down?

If no buyer takes over Character.AI, the platform will be wound down, and the deal with Disney doesn't include user chats. Character.AI lets you export your data in the account settings of the app or the website, so it's worth saving your chats before the sale closes.

Can I move my characters from Character.AI to another app?

Yes, with the CAI Tools browser extension, which saves a Character.AI character as a JSON file or a PNG character card. PolyBuzz and SillyTavern can import these cards. Character definitions that the creator made hidden aren't saved.