#charterapps

While Character AI is popular, alternatives bring better customization and smarter roleplay experiences. These platforms in 2025 are ideal for users seeking more control, creativity, and AI personality choices.

Sakura AI

Sakura.fm is a dynamic platform built for immersive, story-driven roleplay, allowing users to instantly dive into high-energy scenarios across genres like horror, romance, and fantasy. Its core strength lies in richly annotated character sheets that set the stage before a chat even begins, detailing everything from personality archetypes and speech patterns to narrative stakes. This strong creative scaffolding enables users to co-direct cinematic, multi-turn stories with AI personas, focusing on dramatic tension, punchy banter, and emotional depth. 

XOUL AI

Xoul.ai was a user-generated platform centered on creating and interacting with dynamic AI characters, known as "Xouls," for storytelling, roleplay, and creative projects. It emphasized deep customization and sandbox freedom, allowing users to build rich personas and engage in collaborative, multimodal storytelling with image and voice features. The platform attracted a creative community with its relaxed moderation and expressive range, extending its use to agent "swarms" and even Unreal Engine integrations for in-game characters. 

Chatbots.Studio

Based in Lviv, Ukraine, Chatbots.Studio is a specialized conversational AI firm that builds and implements practical chatbots and automation platforms for major industries. It focuses on creating multichannel solutions for messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Viber, as well as for websites, to handle tasks such as customer support, payments, and order tracking. The company acts as a systems integrator, offering end-to-end services from conversation design to process automation, aiming to reduce service costs and improve customer engagement for its clients.

CharacterHub

CharacterHub is a dedicated social platform for artists, writers, and role-players to create, organize, and share their original characters and world-building assets. It functions as a comprehensive portfolio and community space, offering detailed profile templates, galleries, and tagging to showcase character designs and narratives. Users can interact through likes and follows, while a built-in blog provides educational content on creation techniques. The platform also features a marketplace for commissions, supporting a full creator ecosystem. 

Crushon AI

CrushOn.ai carves out a distinct niche as a leading platform for adult-oriented, NSFW-friendly character chatbots, positioning itself as a primary "no filter" alternative to mainstream character AI apps. It enables users to engage in unfiltered roleplay and companionship through a vast library of customizable, community-created AI personas. The service emphasizes creative freedom, allowing for complex, multi-character narratives with strong contextual memory that persists across conversations.

I approached this like a proper product review, scoring each AI companion platform on the categories that separate the serious tools from the toys. Customization, conversation quality, media, voice and calling, and privacy. Several names made the list, candy.ai among them, but sweetdream.ai consistently posted the strongest line across categories.

On customization, SweetDream is in a tier of its own, letting you design looks, voice, personality, backstory and quirks until the character genuinely feels like yours. On conversation, the chat is natural, emotionally intelligent and context-aware, which is the single hardest thing to get right and the thing most platforms still fumble.