AI roleplay chatbots, compared on control, memory and what they keep
Roleplay is the one category here where the tooling matters more than the model. Anyone can put a character card in front of a language model. What separates these products is how much of the machinery they hand you: whether world detail is injected when a trigger word appears, whether you can set sampling behaviour yourself, how much context the plan buys, and whether the thing you wrote last week is still in scope this week. So this guide compares control rather than personality. Context window, whether lorebooks and author's notes exist, whether the model runs on your hardware, and what the vendor states it does with the text you produce. That last one matters more in roleplay than anywhere else on this site, because the input is long, personal and written rather than clicked. One finding is worth stating up front: the best-documented training position in this whole directory belongs to a roleplay tool, and the deepest authoring controls belong to a product whose reputation for privacy is out of date.
What qualifies for this list
- Built for sustained roleplay, meaning a character or scenario that persists across turns rather than a single generation
- Publishes terms and a privacy policy at citable URLs
- No credible reporting of the product generating sexual content involving minors
- Either states a position on training, or the absence is recorded on its listing
What this page does not cover
Most of the search behind this page is for things ClickTug does not list. Saying so is quicker than letting you scroll a table that was never going to help.
- Sales and interview training simulators
- A large share of AI roleplay search is corporate training software: pitch practice, objection handling, interview rehearsal. Useful products, and not adult AI tools, so they belong on a different site.
- Roleplay features inside mainstream assistants
- Prompting a general assistant into a character is a technique rather than a product, and the terms of those services generally prohibit what people are trying to do with them.
- Character-sharing communities with no operator
- Some of the largest roleplay front-ends publish no operating company, no price and no acceptable use policy that can be quoted. We record them rather than list them.
The list
Backyard AI
The deepest authoring controls here: lorebooks, author's notes, response grammars and exposed model parameters. Its local desktop app is deprecated, which most write-ups still get wrong
Unfiltered character chat with a real free tier. The local desktop app it was known for is deprecated.
DreamGen
The clearest no-training commitment in this directory: off by default, opt-in only, and honest that withdrawal cannot un-train a model
Unfiltered roleplay and story generation under Swiss law, with training off by default rather than opt-out.
Uncensored Chat
The strictest wording on minors we have read, with no exception for fictional, drawn or AI-generated work. API access from the middle tier
Unfiltered chat, images and an API, sold in 30-day blocks for cryptocurrency with no auto-renewal.
Venice AI
A general assistant that refuses less, with API access on every tier including the free one
Private uncensored assistant covering text, image and video, with a genuinely free tier.
LM Studio
Runs models on your own hardware, so nothing you write leaves the machine. The honest answer to a privacy question
Runs open models on your own hardware, free, with nothing leaving the machine.
Kindroid
Persistent memory and voice with third-party age verification, if you want a character rather than a scenario
Companion chat with voice calls and generated selfies, and the strictest age check in this category.
SmutFinder
Story and chapter generation sold in one-off credit packs, with a written promise not to train on your work
Uncensored AI story writing sold in credit packs, with a written promise not to train on what you write.
RedQuill
A public library you can read without an account, so the prose quality is checkable before anything is paid
AI erotic fiction with a public library, a strict under-18 rule and no published price.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backyard AI | $12/mo | Self-declared at signup | Not documented | On request to support | No documented output filter | Published | California, United States |
| DreamGen | $7.83/mo | Self-declared at signup | No | Self-serve in account settings | No documented output filter | Published | Switzerland |
| Uncensored Chat | $9/mo | Self-declared at signup | Not documented | Self-serve in account settings | No documented output filter | Published | India, with exclusive jurisdiction in the courts of New Delhi |
| Venice AI | $18/mo | Self-declared at signup | Not documented | On request to support | No documented output filter | Published | Wyoming, United States |
| LM Studio | On request | None stated | No | Self-serve in account settings | No documented output filter | Not applicable | United States |
| Kindroid | $15.99/mo | Document or third-party verification | Not documented | Self-serve in account settings | Light filtering | Published | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| SmutFinder | $4.99/mo | Self-declared at signup | No | On request to support | No documented output filter | Published | Nevada, United States, with disputes in Las Vegas |
| RedQuill | On request | Self-declared at signup | Not documented | On request to support | No documented output filter | Published | New York, United States |
Questions people actually ask
What is the best AI for roleplay?
For authoring control, Backyard AI: lorebooks, author's notes, grammars and exposed sampling parameters, which most competitors do not offer at all. For privacy, LM Studio, because models run on your own hardware and nothing leaves it. For a written guarantee about training, DreamGen. ClickTug publishes no ranking, because the quality of the writing is the thing people mean and it cannot be measured for someone else.
Is there a free AI roleplay chatbot?
Yes, and they differ a lot. Backyard AI gives 300 messages a week at the same context window as its paid entry plan, which makes it a fair test. Venice AI gives a daily allowance including API access. LM Studio is free outright because it runs locally. Several others advertise a free tier and publish no allowance for it, which each listing records.
Which AI roleplay tools have long-term memory?
This is the question ClickTug cannot answer honestly for most of them, and our listings say so. Memory behaviour needs an account to test, and we hold none, so it is marked not tested rather than guessed at. What is checkable is context window, which is published: DreamGen sells plans by it, from 5,000 to 30,000 tokens, and Backyard AI goes up to 100,000 on its top tier.
Can I run an AI roleplay chatbot locally?
Yes. LM Studio and Ollama both run open-weight models on your own hardware, which removes the retention and training questions entirely because nothing is sent anywhere. Backyard AI used to be the popular answer to this and its desktop app is now deprecated by the vendor's own notice, so anything recommending it for local use is out of date.
Do roleplay chatbots train on what I write?
Mostly unknown, which is itself the finding. Of the tools here, DreamGen states training is off by default and opt-in only, and SmutFinder states it does not use private chats, images or voice data to train models. Most others do not address it anywhere, and our listings record that as not documented rather than assuming.
Every figure on this page comes from the vendor's own pages on the date shown, and each tool's listing links the document it was read from. Something out of date? Tell us. How we check anything is on our methodology page.