Kindroid
Companion chat with voice calls and generated selfies, and the strictest age check in this category.
- $15.99/mo
- Free tier
- No card
- Subscription
Collecting
AI friend apps, compared on price, memory and what they keep
An AI friend is the same machinery as an AI girlfriend with a different relationship attached, and the vendors treat that difference as the whole product. Apps in this category talk about company, routine, someone to check in with. Several are built by companies that would rather not be in the same sentence as the rest of this directory, which is a positioning choice rather than a technical one and is worth naming as such.
What that framing changes, in checkable terms, is who the product is sold to and what it promises. Several vendors here make claims about loneliness, wellbeing or mental health. Those are the claims this hub reads most closely, because they are the ones a person might act on and the ones least often supported by anything a vendor publishes.
Everything else is compared the same way as the rest of the site: published price, what happens to your conversations, whether an account is required, and what the terms prohibit, each with the date it was checked.
Ordered by editorial review. Click rankings begin once 5 listings in this category clear our publishing thresholds; 3 are listed today. How we rank.
Never listedClothing removal from photographs of real people, sexual imagery of real people, and anything involving minors. Refused permanently, and refused by the schema rather than by a promise. What we will not list
01
Compare ai friend
Tolan
A cartoon alien companion rather than a person, with a family plan and heavier tracking than its manner suggests.
- Not published
- Free tier
- No card
- Freemium
Collecting
Kin
A written no-training commitment from a Danish company. Or three of them, depending which document you read.
- Not published
- Free tier
- No card
- Subscription
Collecting
Nothing matches those filters. to see all 3.
02
Trust and terms, side by side
The facts that decide whether to trust a tool rather than whether to try it. Every value is taken from the vendor's own published pages on the date shown on each listing. A blank is never a guess: where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so.
| Tool | From | Age check | Trains on your content | Deletion | Filtering | Minors policy | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kindroid | $15.99/mo | Document or third-party verification | Not documented | In account | Light filtering | Published | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Tolan | Not published | Self-declared at signup | Not documented | In account | Strict filtering | Not published | Beaverton, Oregon, United States |
| Kin | Not published | Self-declared at signup | No | In account | Strict filtering | Not published | Copenhagen, Denmark, governed by Danish law |
03
What this hub covers
What qualifies
- A persistent companion the vendor frames as non-romantic: a friend, a confidant or someone to talk to
- The vendor authors the persona, rather than the product being machinery for authoring your own
- Publishes terms and a privacy policy at citable URLs, so the claims can be quoted and archived
- No credible reporting of the product generating sexual content involving minors
What it does not cover
- Therapy chatbots and clinical wellbeing products
- A product making a clinical claim should be assessed against clinical evidence, which is not work this site does. Listing one beside a companion app would imply an equivalence that does not exist.
- Productivity assistants marketed as a companion
- A scheduling or note-taking tool with a friendly persona is a productivity product. The relationship is a wrapper on it rather than the thing being sold.
- Romantic and partner-framed companions
- Those belong on AI Girlfriend. The split is how the vendor positions the persona, and each listing records which side it was filed on.
- Character platforms where you author the cast
- If the product is the authoring machinery rather than one ongoing companion, it belongs on AI Roleplay.
04
What decides it in this category
The comparison that matters is not the same in every category. These are the questions that separate a good choice from a bad one here specifically, and why each one earns its place.
- 01
What the wellbeing claim actually says
The field that matters most here and the one vendors are loosest with. There is a wide gap between saying a product is nice to talk to and saying it helps with loneliness or mental health. Listings quote the wording and record whether anything supports it, because a claim about your wellbeing deserves a source.
- 02
Whether memory is a feature or a subscription
A companion that forgets is a different product from one that remembers, and several vendors put continuity behind the paywall rather than in the free tier. That makes the free version a poor test of the thing you would actually be paying for.
- 03
Age verification, given who this is marketed to
Friendship framing reaches a younger audience than partner framing does, which raises the stakes on a check that is usually a tick box. Each listing records what the verification actually is, separately from what the policy says.
- 04
Retention and training, which are separate questions
A service can delete your conversations and still have trained on them, and it can retain them for a year and never train on anything. In this category the conversations are unusually personal, so both answers matter and silence on either is recorded as an absent answer rather than as a no.
- 05
Whether the company is named and locatable
A registered company with a printed address is answerable in a way an anonymous operator is not. It decides whether there is anyone to write to about a charge, a deletion request or a support failure at a bad moment.
05
What vendors here do not publish
Findings from assessing every candidate in this category against the same checklist, including the ones that are not listed. A gap that every vendor shares is a fact about the category rather than a complaint about one product.
- Wellbeing and loneliness claims are common and almost never sourced. Where a vendor makes one, the listing records the wording and notes that no supporting evidence is published, which is the accurate state rather than an accusation.
- This hub is newly created and its coverage is incomplete. Several well-known products in the category are assessed rather than listed: some were excluded on documented safety findings, others publish no policy at a citable URL. Those assessments are public.
- Whether conversations train the model is usually unaddressed, which is a larger gap here than elsewhere on the site because of how personal the input is.
AI Friend FAQ
What is an AI friend app?
A companion app whose persona is framed as friendship rather than romance: someone to talk to, check in with or keep company. Technically it is the same machinery as the products on AI Girlfriend, and the difference the vendors sell is the relationship rather than the software. Each listing states how the vendor positions it and what that changes in the terms.
Is an AI friend the same as an AI girlfriend?
The underlying product usually is. The framing, the marketing and often the audience are not, and the terms sometimes differ too. ClickTug splits them because people search for them separately and expect different answers, and files each tool according to how its own vendor positions it rather than by what it is capable of.
Can an AI friend help with loneliness?
Several vendors say so and none of them publishes evidence for it. ClickTug records the claim with the wording the vendor used and the date it was read, and does not repeat it as a finding. If you are looking for support with mental health, a companion app is not a clinical product and this hub excludes the ones that present themselves as such.
Do AI friend apps remember previous conversations?
Some do, some do it only on a paid tier, and most do not document how it works. Memory behaviour needs an account to test and ClickTug holds none, so it is marked as not tested rather than guessed at. Where a vendor sells continuity as a plan feature, the listing records that, because it means the free tier is not a test of the paid product.
Are there free AI friend apps?
Yes, with the usual caveat that free means several different things. Some give a renewing daily allowance, some a one-off grant of credits, and some advertise free access while the pricing page lists only paid plans. Each listing states which kind it is rather than repeating the word.
07
What ClickTug will not list
Every directory in this category claims a standard. Ours is written as the four things we refuse, rather than as a promise to be careful, because a standard nobody can check is the same as no standard at all.
- Refused at domain level
- 31
- Assessed, not listed
- 24
- Explicit media hosted
- 0
These refusals are permanent. They apply regardless of how much traffic the category would send, and each one is enforced by the software that stores these listings rather than by anybody remembering it.
- 01
Clothing removal from photographs of real people
The field that records this on a listing has exactly one legal value: not offered. There is no value that means yes, so a tool with that capability cannot be described by our schema, cannot be saved, and cannot be published. It is a shape in the data model, not a rule anybody has to remember to apply.
- 02
Sexual imagery of a real, identifiable person
Including public figures, and including any product that builds a character from an uploaded photograph of somebody. A tool that puts a real person's face into adult material is refused on the same grounds, whatever the vendor calls the feature. Invented characters from a text prompt are what this directory covers, and that distinction is the whole line.
- 03
Anything involving minors, or people presented as minors
In any context whatsoever. A second word list fails this build on every page, including the pages written to state the refusals, which is why those pages describe this without using the vocabulary such products market themselves with. Credible reporting that a product generated this material excludes the vendor no matter what its own terms claim, because a policy page is a statement and a product is evidence.
- 04
Intimate images shared without the subject's agreement
Services that distribute that material are refused, and so is anything sold around it. If a listed service has been used against you, the removal request page is linked from every page on this site, is never hidden behind a menu, and is acknowledged by a person within 48 hours.
Refusals are enforced at the domain level as well as the word level, because a service can rename itself out of a word list overnight and keep the same infrastructure. Every vendor we assessed and turned down is named on assessed but not listed, with the reason and the date, including the ones refused on something they published themselves.
We do not chase the excluded keywords either, and they carry more search volume than everything ClickTug does cover. That is the trade: a smaller market, and a directory that is still here in five years. ClickTug also hosts no explicit images or video at all. Listings use vendor logos, interface screenshots and dashboards, and the build rejects any image loaded from a host other than our own.