# Top 10 Chub Alternatives in 2026 Source: https://lunafic.ai/blog/top-10-chub-alternatives-2026 | Published: 2026-09-03T14:25:14.649Z | Updated: 2026-10-17T05:10:33.460Z | Author: Lunafic Team | Tags: Roleplay, Chub, Comparison > What Chub actually is, what happened to it in 2026, and the ten honest alternatives people moved to, from SillyTavern and Janitor to Lunafic. > **Update, October 13, 2026.** Character.AI filed for bankruptcy on October 12, and the company is being sold. The app still works for now, and it will close if no buyer keeps it running. We are honestly sad about this. Character.AI introduced millions of people to AI characters, many of us included. Before listing alternatives, it helps to say what Chub actually is, because half the frustration people have with it comes from expecting the wrong thing. Chub is a library, one of the largest character card collections on the planet, almost no upload restrictions, and the cards are in an open format that works across platforms. The chat platform attached to that library is rough, model proxies confuse even experienced users, and in 2026 the free tier was cut to a handful of messages a day, which is when long-time users opened threads literally titled "Chub is now dead". Maybe it recovers. A lot of people already left. Here is where they went, in the order they usually try. ### 1. Janitor AI, the same feeling with fewer rules Big library of its own, relaxed content, easy to start, free chat on the built-in model, janitor+ at $12.99 a month, or your own model key. The free model weakens in long scenes, the free limits are undocumented, and its own users reviewed the paid tier badly. If you want Chub's freedom in a smoother app, this is the first stop, just know the memory problem comes with it, the free model only reads the recent part of your chat. ### 2. SillyTavern, the machine that reads Chub's own cards Less an alternative, more the other half of the system. The cards you download from Chub open directly in SillyTavern, so a lot of people never stopped using Chub at all, they just moved the playing part. Free, open source, any model, total privacy, and the price is your own setup time, famously around a month for a total beginner. If you love tinkering, this is the power path. ### 3. Character.AI, the opposite door Everything Chub is not, filtered, polished, zero setup, endless characters, a free tier that built the category. Long stories still lose the thread, the edit button is gone, and the company is busy producing vertical short dramas now. Good for casual free chat, which is a different hunger than the one that brought you to Chub. ### 4. Lunafic, ours, worlds instead of cards We come at it from a different angle, instead of collecting characters, you enter a world, its characters, rules, an opening scene. You play it like a chat, every reply shows as avatar dialogue beside the speaking character's portrait and name, and the whole story is an editor where you can fix any line, kept as chapters you can search and export. You play one character, the AI plays all the characters in their own voices and languages, and it reads your whole story before every reply so chapter 40 still knows chapter 4. In our October 2026 test, on a real player's story of 1,600 long turns, the AI still answered every direct question about facts we hid in chapter 1. The bad parts, the library is young next to Chub's ocean, and we have no phone app yet, the website works on phones. What we keep finding is that people who liked browsing cards often enjoy building their own world even more, and that is the easiest here. ### 5. SpicyChat, intensity over memory Unrestricted chat, free through a queue instead of a hard cap, which works until the queue is long. The documented complaint is memory fading after fifteen to twenty messages even on paid plans. Delivers the evening it promises, not the month. ### 6. CrushOn AI, the neighboring house The same idea as SpicyChat with daily free limits, reviews put it slightly behind on polish. A reasonable fallback when the SpicyChat queue is unbearable, same memory fate underneath. ### 7. RisuAI, cards in the browser, five minutes A browser client that opens the same character cards, with its own card sharing site, and a reputation as the five-minute setup of this corner. Sits between Janitor's ease and SillyTavern's control. Smaller community, you still bring the model. ### 8. Agnaistic, the open source hub that browses Chub directly Open source, free with no hard limits, can browse the Chub library from inside, and it is the one that supports playing together with friends, shared characters and multi-user sessions. Built by the card community, younger and rougher than the established names. ### 9. Kindroid, when the real hunger was a person A companion app, not a card platform, deep customization, selfies, voice, from $13.99 a month. Some people leave card sites and realize what they wanted all along was one bond that remembers them. ### 10. Nomi, the one that remembers you Also a companion app, about $16 a month, praised for holding personal details across months. One bond, no other characters, no chapters, no export. Good at what it is. ## The thing nine of these ten share The conversation grows, the app hands the model only the recent chunk, the beginning of your story quietly stops existing, and one night you re-explain your own plot to a machine that was there when you wrote it. Character cards never fixed that, because cards describe people, they do not remember stories. The full explanation of the memory problem, and how our memory did on a 1,600 turn story, is [in this article](https://lunafic.ai/blog/ai-roleplay-long-term-memory). ## Where to go next If you want to feel the difference between collecting characters and entering a world, [the Lunafic library is open tonight](https://lunafic.ai/), free to look around. Coming from the big platforms, the [Character.AI comparison page](https://lunafic.ai/compare/character-ai) is the detailed one. Or test them all yourself, most are free while AI god still pays their GPU bills. :D --- Read this on Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/blog/top-10-chub-alternatives-2026 More from Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/blog What is Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/ai-roleplay AI characters you build stories with over long memories. You play as your character, the AI plays everyone else, and stories stay private by default.