Character card sites solve one half of a problem. You still need something to run the character against, and the two halves are usually different products.
That is the useful way to sort alternatives here. Some of the tools below are places to author and store characters, some are engines that run them, and a few do both. Which you need depends on whether you already have a collection you care about.
Every price below was read from the vendor’s own page and carries the date it was checked on its listing.
The short answer
| If you want | Try | Free | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| To import cards you already have | SillyTavern | Yes | Free |
| Authoring depth with no assembly | Backyard AI | Yes | 12 dollars |
| The cheapest hosted option | CrushOn.AI | Yes | 4.90 dollars |
| Long-form story structure | DreamGen | Yes | 7.83 dollars |
| A daily free allowance | 976.ai | Yes, renews daily | 10.99 dollars |
| To run everything yourself | KoboldCpp | Yes | Free |
None of the hosted options asks for a credit card to create an account.
SillyTavern, if you have a collection
The standard destination for character cards, free, open source, and installed on your own machine. If you have built up characters you do not want to lose, this is the safest place to take them.
The catch is the one that sends people looking for alternatives in the first place: it is a frontend and expects you to supply and run a model backend separately. That step is where most attempts stop. If that is your objection, KoboldCpp bundles a backend in one executable and can serve SillyTavern as well, which makes it a reasonable half-step.
Read the full SillyTavern assessment
Backyard AI, authoring without the project
Lorebooks, author’s notes, response grammars and exposed model parameters, with none of the setup. The free tier carries the same context window as the paid plan, which is unusual.
One correction most write-ups still miss: Backyard was formerly Faraday.dev and is widely described as a local app. Its own download page now says that desktop app is deprecated and unsupported, and the live product is a cloud service. If local operation was the appeal, look at SillyTavern or KoboldCpp instead.
Read the full Backyard AI assessment
CrushOn.AI, the cheapest hosted route
4.90 dollars a month and a genuine free tier, which makes it the lowest-cost way to have characters running without installing anything.
Read the full CrushOn.AI assessment
DreamGen, if scenes turn into chapters
Built for story structure rather than chat that happens to run long, at 7.83 dollars. It also publishes the clearest position on model training in this directory: off by default, opt-in only, and honest that withdrawal cannot un-train a model that has already learned from your work.
Read the full DreamGen assessment
976.ai, if you want to test properly first
A free allowance that is permanent, renews every day, and reaches the whole character roster with voice messages included. That is a fair test of the product rather than a demo of it.
Read the full 976.ai assessment
KoboldCpp, if you want to own the whole stack
One self-contained executable that runs models on your own hardware. No account, no subscription, nothing transmitted. It also works as a backend for other frontends, so it complements SillyTavern rather than replacing it.
Read the full KoboldCpp assessment
Before you move a collection
Two things are worth checking, and neither is usually documented:
Whether characters import at all. Hosted services generally expect you to create characters in their own interface. A card library does not necessarily move with you, and finding that out after subscribing is the wrong order.
What happens to what you write. Retention, and whether the vendor trains on your conversations. Most policies in this category do not address training either way, which is why ClickTug records it as not documented rather than as a no. Running locally removes the question entirely.
More comparisons: AI roleplay chatbots and uncensored AI tools.