The best AI chatbot for roleplay depends on how you play

Character AI

Character AI is built around characters its community makes and shares. Its help center says messaging is free and unlimited for everyone; the paid subscription skips the waiting room that appears under heavy load and makes replies roughly two to three times faster. Memory now has its own screen: Story Memory and pinned messages for all users, with auto-captured Facts for subscribers. Its community guidelines ban explicit adult content outright. The subscribe page would not load for this piece, so the price cell stays empty.

Janitor AI

Janitor AI pairs a character library with its own free model, JLLM, and lets you connect an outside model through an API instead. Its help article puts the free model's memory at around 8k to 9k tokens. The paid plan was listed at $12.99 a month or $99 a year when checked in November 2026, with five times the memory and faster replies at busy times. Its terms require users to be 18 or older, and its content guidelines allow adult content between consenting adult characters while banning a list of categories.

SpicyChat AI

SpicyChat AI says plainly that it avoids heavy moderation beyond illegal content and its public pages. Its docs give exact context sizes: 4,096 tokens on the free and lowest paid tiers, 8,192 on the middle one, and up to 32,768 on the top tier, depending on the model. Monthly prices were listed at $5.95, $19.95 and $29.95 when checked in November 2026. The docs also suggest keeping a character setup to about 800 to 1,100 tokens, which is sound advice on any platform. Its terms require everyone depicted to be an adult; a minimum age for users did not turn up on the terms page checked here.

Chub

Chub is a library of character cards with a chat front end attached. You can bring your own key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter or NovelAI, point it at a local model, or subscribe to its own models, listed at $20 a month and paid in crypto only when checked in November 2026. New users get one-time trial credits worth a few dozen messages. Its docs describe the platform as uncensored, and its terms require users to be 18 or older. Its own model, Soji, runs at 60K context for subscribers, per the subscription page and its patch notes; with an outside model, memory depends on that model.

Kindroid

Kindroid is a companion app first, but long-running characters are exactly what it is built for. Memory comes in layers: short-term context, a medium-term system it calls Cascaded Memory, then long-term memory and journal entries recalled by keyword. New accounts get a one-time preview of 50 messages (15 in some regions); after that you need the three-day trial, which asks for a payment method, or a subscription. Prices only appear at checkout, so the table leaves them out. Its terms make it adults only.

AI Dungeon

AI Dungeon is a text adventure: you type what your character does and the AI narrates what happens next. The free tier reads up to 4k tokens of context. Paid tiers were listed at 8k for $14.99 a month, 16k for $29.99, and up to 32k on the two top tiers at $49.99 and $99.99, when checked in November 2026. Its moderation page says unpublished single-player play is never moderated, while anything you publish goes through a rating check and the community guidelines.

NovelAI

NovelAI is a story editor more than a chat app, which suits players who like co-writing prose. The free trial gives 50 text generations on an email-verified account. Subscriptions were listed at $10, $15 and $25 a month when checked in November 2026. The top tier, Opus, reads up to 28,672 tokens of your story; the docs say the middle tier gets more context than the bottom one but give no figure on the subscription page.

Its FAQ says saved stories are encrypted in your browser before they reach its servers, while generation sends unencrypted parts of the story to the server over HTTPS, which it says are not stored or logged.

SillyTavern

SillyTavern is the odd one out: a free, open-source front end you install yourself, which then talks to whatever model you connect, cloud or local. That makes memory and content rules a property of your model rather than of the app. Its docs note that local models have no content filter, while cloud APIs filter to varying degrees. The cost is setup time, and the SillyTavern setup guide covers the install from an empty folder.