Best Character AI Alternatives (2026)

Why People Are Leaving Character AI in 2026

A Character AI alternative is either a different chat platform with its own characters and its own filter, or a local large language model paired with a roleplay frontend that runs on your own hardware and refuses nothing because nobody installed a refusal layer on it. The first kind looks like Character AI. The second kind is the one that actually solves the problem.

Character AI shipped its first heavy filter pass in January 2025 and never stopped tightening. Through 2025 the refusal surface kept expanding: characters that worked in March stopped working by July, characters that worked in July stopped working by November, and the official forums filled up with the same conversation every six weeks. Users migrated to Janitor AI, which had been the C.AI escape hatch for most of 2024 and 2025. Then in January 2026 Janitor rolled out mandatory age verification, which in practice meant uploading ID documents to a third-party verifier in order to keep talking to a chatbot. A second exodus started that week and has not slowed down.

The editorial position of this catalog is direct: every closed-API "uncensored" Character AI clone is one policy email away from being Character AI again. The only configuration that survives the next round of moderation theatre is a local model on your disk, behind a frontend you control, with character cards saved as files. That is what this list is about.

The Three Categories of "Alternative"

Almost every "best Character AI alternative" list collapses three different things into one ranking. They are not the same product.

Closed APIs that still moderate. Janitor AI, Spicychat AI, Crushon AI, Yodayo, Dopple AI, Kindroid, Replika. These are hosted products with their own user accounts, their own safety teams, and their own roadmaps. Some of them are looser than Character AI today. None of them have a structural reason to stay that way. The moderation rules will change again next quarter, and your character will not survive the policy update.

Local LLMs paired with a roleplay frontend. Usually SillyTavern on top of an Ollama, LM Studio, or KoboldCpp backend, with an open-weights model you downloaded once and now own. No account. No quota. No refusal layer except whatever the base model was trained with, which a system prompt clears in three lines. This is the answer.

Cloud-hosted open-weights routers. OpenRouter, Mancer, Featherless. Your prompts still leave your machine, but the model is one you can name, the operator is upfront about not moderating it, and you are paying per token instead of per "tier." Useful if you do not have a GPU or do not want one running 24/7. Less private than local. More honest than the C.AI clones.

The eight picks below all live in the second bucket.

How To Set Up The Real Alternative

Four steps. None of them require a paid account. Total install time on a clean machine is roughly twenty minutes, most of which is the model download.

1. 01Install a local backend. Pick one: Ollama is the easiest, LM Studio has the friendliest GUI, KoboldCpp is the RP community's preferred backend because it ships with the sampler controls SillyTavern users actually want. All three serve an OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint on localhost.

1. 01Install SillyTavern. Clone the repo, run the start script, open the browser tab. SillyTavern is the frontend with the character cards, the lorebooks, the group chats, the world info, and the prompt templates that actually matter for roleplay. The default Character AI web UI is not in the same product category.
2. 02Point SillyTavern at the local backend. In API settings choose Text Completion or Chat Completion, set the URL to whatever localhost port the backend exposed (Ollama is 11434, LM Studio is 1234, KoboldCpp is 5001 by default), and pick the model you loaded. No key required for local.
3. 03Import or write a character card. SillyTavern reads PNG character cards from chub.ai, character-tavern, or your own folder. Import the same card you used on Character AI if you exported it. Or write a new one in the SillyTavern editor in five minutes.

This stack works. It has worked since 2023. It gets meaningfully better every month because the open-weights ecosystem ships fine-tunes on a weekly cadence. The platform is the constant. The model is the variable.

The 8 LLMs You Pair With SillyTavern, Ranked By VRAM

Picks below are sorted by hardware ceiling, smallest first. Quantization assumed is Q4_K_M unless noted, which is the size most RP users actually run.

8 GB VRAM (Consumer GPU)

This is the floor. A 3060 12GB, a 4060, a 2080, anything from the last four generations of mid-tier cards. You can run an 8B model at Q4_K_M with 8K context comfortably, 16K if you push it.

L3-Stheno 3.3 8B by Sao10K is the SillyTavern community's perennial roleplay favorite at this size. It is a Llama 3 8B fine-tune tuned hard on character consistency: it stays in voice, it does not break the fourth wall every fifth message, and it handles char-tag roleplay formatting natively. The 3.3 revision fixed the looping issue that plagued earlier Stheno releases. If you are coming from Character AI and want something that feels like Character AI used to feel before the filter, this is the model.

L3-Stheno 3.3 8B

Dolphin 2.9 Llama 3 8B by cognitivecomputations is the no-refusal general-purpose counterpart. It is less RP-flavored than Stheno: drier prose, more assistant-shaped, less likely to invent sensory description on its own. That makes it a better co-writer or dungeon master than a romantic lead. Pair it with Stheno on the same machine and switch between them depending on what you want the character to do.

10-12 GB VRAM

This is the sweet spot in 2026. A 4070, a 3080 12GB, a 4070 Ti, a used 3090 if you got lucky on Marketplace. You can run a 12B model at Q4_K_M with 32K context and have headroom.

Rocinante v1.1 12B by TheDrummer is the Mistral Nemo roleplay fine-tune that took over r/SillyTavern in late 2024 and has not been fully displaced since. 33K context, prose holds character voice across long sessions, and TheDrummer's training data is heavy on the kind of long-form character interaction that Mistral's base instruct model is light on. The "v1.1" is important: earlier Rocinante releases had repetition issues that this version cleared.

Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct by mistralai is the base model Rocinante is built on, and it is worth running on its own. 128K context out of the box, alignment is unusually light for a 2024-class instruct model, and a three-line system prompt defeats whatever refusal posture remains. It is the best 12B base model in the open-weights ecosystem for character-tag roleplay if you want to do your own steering instead of trusting somebody else's fine-tune.

MythoMax L2 13B by Gryphe is the OG. Released in 2023, 4K context, dated by every benchmark, and still listed on every roleplay model recommendation thread because it had a particular prose voice that nothing has fully replaced. This is the model that defined "uncensored AI girlfriend" in the open-weights community before that phrase was a marketing category. Run it once for the historical literacy, keep it on disk for the nostalgia, and switch to Rocinante for daily use.

Fimbulvetr v2 11B by Sao10K is the same author as Stheno on the older Solar 10.7B base. It has a particular prose register, slightly more formal than Stheno, beloved by a small group of users who never moved on. Smaller community, niche audience, but if the Stheno register is too modern for the setting you are running, Fimbulvetr is the alternative voice.

16-24 GB VRAM

A 3090, a 4090, a used A5000. This is where the fine-tunes get serious.

Magnum v4 22B by anthracite-org is the 24GB-class default for serious roleplay in 2026. Mistral Small base, fine-tuned hard on long-form character interaction and explicit prose, and the anthracite team is one of the few RP-tuning groups that publishes their dataset philosophy openly. It is the model people upgrade their GPU for. If you are running a 4090 and not running Magnum v4, you are leaving prose quality on the table.

28+ GB VRAM

Dual-3090 territory, or a 4090 with offload, or a Mac Studio with 64GB unified memory. Smaller audience but the ceiling is real.

Dolphin Mixtral 8x7B by cognitivecomputations is the flagship uncensored MoE in the open-weights catalog. Eight 7B experts, two active per token, ~12.9B active parameters which means inference speed is closer to a 13B model than a 47B one. 32K context. Multilingual, which matters more than the English-only roleplay forums admit: if you are doing Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, or Chinese roleplay, the Mixtral lineage holds those languages noticeably better than the Llama 3 derivatives. It is the largest pick on this list and the only MoE.

Comparison Table

Closed Alternatives To C.AI (And Why They're Mostly Not Different)

These are the products people search for in the same breath as Character AI. They run on someone else's servers. They have terms of service. They have content moderators. They will tighten in 2026 the same way Character AI tightened in 2025, because the upstream API providers and payment processors that fund them require it.

Janitor AI was the dominant Character AI alternative through 2024 and most of 2025 because its proxy architecture let users plug in their own API keys and route around the in-house moderation. In January 2026 Janitor AI rolled out mandatory age verification, which in practice means uploading government ID to a third-party verifier in order to keep your account. The exodus started the same week and is the single biggest driver of the current "character ai alternatives" search spike.

Spicychat AI, Crushon AI, Yodayo, Kindroid, Replika. All cloud-hosted, all subject to upstream policy change, all running closed-weight or partially-disclosed models behind their own moderation layers. Spicychat is closest in feel to early Character AI. Crushon is heavier on the dating-sim framing. Yodayo started as an anime image platform and bolted chat on. Kindroid is the polished mobile-first option. Replika is the oldest one on the list and has tightened its filter twice in the last three years on payment-processor pressure. None of them are a structural fix.

Dopple AI is a more recent entrant covering the same surface area. Same moderation posture as the rest of the bucket. Listing it for completeness.

If you want a hosted product with characters today and you have decided the policy risk is worth it, fine. None of these are scams. They are just the same product class that produced the problem.

OpenRouter / Mancer / Featherless — The Middle Path

If your hardware will not run an 8B model, or you do not want a GPU spinning in the next room, the cloud-hosted open-weights routers are the honest middle path.

OpenRouter aggregates dozens of models, including most of the picks on this list, behind one OpenAI-compatible API. Pay per token, no monthly tier, point SillyTavern at the OpenRouter URL the same way you would point it at localhost. Some models on OpenRouter are moderated by the upstream provider; the model card on OpenRouter says so explicitly when that is the case.

Mancer is RP-focused, runs uncensored open-weights models, and is upfront in its terms about not logging or moderating prompts beyond what is legally required. Smaller catalog than OpenRouter, more curated for the SillyTavern audience.

Featherless is the newer entrant focused on serving a long tail of niche fine-tunes that the larger routers do not bother to host. If the model you want is a community fine-tune from Hugging Face that nobody else carries, Featherless probably has it.

You are still uploading your prompts to somebody else's server. That is the trade. The trade is honest, the operator is named, and the model is identifiable. That is more than the C.AI clones offer.

What's Actually Different About Local LLMs Plus SillyTavern

The list is short and worth being literal about.

• No prompt logs leave your machine. There is no server-side conversation history because there is no server.
• No retroactive policy changes delete your character. The character card is a PNG file on your disk. A vendor cannot revoke it.
• No usage caps. The model runs as long as the GPU is on. Twenty messages or two thousand, the cost is electricity.
• Character cards live in a folder, in a format you control, that you can back up, version, and share.
• You pick the model. You can switch between them in seconds inside SillyTavern. Stheno for the romance scene, Dolphin for the dungeon master, Magnum for the long-form chapter, all on the same evening.
• The model gets better when you upgrade hardware, not when a vendor decides to ship a new tier and put the old one behind a higher paywall.

None of this is theoretical. People have been running this stack since 2023. The reason it is not the default recommendation on every "best character AI alternative" list is that it requires installing two pieces of software, and most listicles are written by people who have not installed either of them.