Every comparison, with sources.

In May 2026 a mainstream tech newsroom ran the headline “Lobotomized: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like” — documenting users scattering into five separate protest subreddits after the Pipsqueak 2 model became the default and the Soft Launch and Roar styles they preferred were retired.

Source: 404 Media, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Character.AI has the largest character library anywhere and it is not close. If you want millions of user-made characters rather than a companion who remembers you, they are still the place.

Replika's founder has moved on. Eugenia Kuyda stepped down as CEO, and in November 2025 raised $20M for a different company — while Replika's age check is still, as of February 2026, nothing but a self-reported birthday.

Source: TechCrunch, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Replika has been doing this longer than anyone and its wellness framing is sincere. If you want a companion with no adult content at all, it is a reasonable choice.

Candy AI's refund policy requires all three: within 24 hours of payment, 20 tokens or fewer used, and card payments only. On an image-generation product, that is roughly six pictures before your refund rights are gone.

Source: Candy AI's own help centre, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Candy AI's image quality is genuinely good and their character consistency holds up over time. The complaint is what it costs to use it, not how it looks.

DreamGF's membership policy reserves the right to charge former customers $1.99 a month indefinitely: a “Maintenance Charge… to keep user accounts active” on “previously purchased accounts.”

Source: DreamGF's own membership policy, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: DreamGF's generated images do resemble the character you built, which is not true of every product in this category.

Janitor's own help centre compares its companion's memory to “a goldfish with a notepad,” warns that “the bot forgets what happened five replies ago,” and puts the free budget at 8,000 to 9,000 tokens — then sells five times more context for $12.99 a month.

Source: Janitor AI's own help centre, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Janitor's free tier really is unlimited messages with millions of community characters, and they are honest in their own docs about what it costs you in memory. The pain is setup, queues and forgetting, not a message meter.

SpicyChat's own documentation says free users' companions keep “around 20 recent messages” — and the $5.95 tier buys the identical 4,096-token memory. The first tier that improves it is $19.95 a month.

Source: SpicyChat's own documentation, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: SpicyChat is genuinely the easiest uncensored platform to start using — no keys, no proxy, no setup. That was always its appeal and it still holds.

Nomi spent most of 2026 inside an unfinished model migration, and said so itself — its founder called one release “dead on arrival,” conceded the next made companions feel “a little colder,” and by June 2026 was still saying “I'm frustrated that Cambrian still isn't stable.”

Source: Nomi's own dev-stream summary, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Nomi's pricing is the most honest in this category: one tier, everything core included. Their developers talk publicly about their own problems, which almost nobody here does. If you are happy there, stay.

Kindroid meters your companion's memory by subscription tier — 480,000 characters of context on Standard, 1.2 million on Ultra, 2.8 million on MAX — per their own update log. How much of you it can hold is a line item.

Source: Kindroid's own update log, checked 2026-09-12.

Where they are good: Kindroid is the most actively developed product on this list — a full V2 shipped in August 2026 — and it has not raised prices; in December 2025 it increased memory at the same cost. It is rated 4.8 on the App Store and deserves it.