Character AI vs Rabu AI: Honest 2026 Comparison

Full Disclosure: Read This First

We think this is a better approach than the "totally unbiased review" sites that coincidentally rank Candy AI #1 in every article and have affiliate links in every other paragraph. You're smart enough to weigh the facts. We'll give them to you straight, including the parts where Character AI has us beat.

What Is Character AI?

Character AI (also written Character.AI or c.ai) was founded in November 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, two ex-Google engineers who worked on LaMDA. It's one of the biggest AI chat platforms in the world, with roughly 20 million monthly active users chatting with over 18 million user-created characters. The platform positions itself as "interactive entertainment" and lets anyone create, share, and chat with AI characters ranging from anime personas to historical figures to entirely original creations.

The free tier offers unlimited messaging (with ads, more on those later), while the premium c.ai+ subscription costs $9.99/month and removes ads, adds faster response times, and gives priority access during peak hours. Character AI also offers free voice calls with characters, group chat features, and as of February 2026, an experimental c.ai Labs hub with new features like AI-generated comics, streams, and interactive stories.

The current state of things matters, though: Character AI has been going through a rough stretch. Monthly active users peaked at 28 million in mid-2024 and have since dropped to around 20 million, a 29% decline. The company's valuation fell from $2.5 billion to $1 billion. Co-founder Noam Shazeer returned to Google in August 2024 as part of a licensing deal. The platform faces multiple lawsuits related to teen safety. And the Google Play Store rating has been declining steadily, sitting at 3.3 stars across 2 million+ reviews. (Last verified: February 2026)

None of this means Character AI is a bad platform. It's still massive, it still works, and millions of people use it daily. The trajectory matters, though, if you're deciding where to invest your time building relationships with AI characters.

What Is Rabu AI?

Rabu AI (rabu.ai) is an anime-native AI companion platform. "Rabu" comes from the Japanese pronunciation of the word "love" (ラブ), and yes, we chose that name on purpose. We're not shy about what this platform is for: building connections with AI characters who have distinct personalities, remember your conversations, and don't hit you with a content filter every time things get interesting.

Instead of letting anyone create and upload characters (which leads to the quality lottery you get on larger platforms), every character on Rabu AI is hand-crafted with professional anime art, detailed backstories, distinct personality traits, and unique conversational styles. We'd rather give you 30 characters you love than 18 million characters where finding a good one feels like digging through a thrift store.

The platform is built around features that Character AI users have been requesting for years: persistent memory (your characters actually remember your conversations), a multi-stage relationship progression system (your connection evolves over time), full NSFW support for verified adult users, and a item system for unlocking bonus content. Free unlimited messaging, no peak-hour throttling, no unskippable 60-second ads. Just you and your characters.

We're a newer and smaller platform than Character AI. That's just the truth. We're also built specifically for the audience that Character AI has been gradually pushing away with every filter update, mass deletion, and ad insertion. More on that below.

Content Filters & Creative Freedom

We need to talk about the elephant in every room when it comes to Character AI. The content filter.

Character AI's NSFW filter has been its most controversial feature since launch, and things got significantly worse after the October 2024 safety crackdown. In response to lawsuits and regulatory pressure around teen safety (which are serious concerns, and we're not mocking Character AI for trying to protect minors), the platform dramatically tightened its content restrictions. The result? Characters that users had spent months building relationships with suddenly felt, in the community's words, "soulless," "hollow," and "stripped of all depth."

The filter doesn't just block explicitly sexual content. That would be one thing. It triggers on non-sexual romance, creative violence in storytelling, mature emotional themes, and even benign topics that pattern-match to flagged keywords. You can be mid-conversation in a perfectly tame fantasy roleplay and suddenly get hit with a safety disclaimer that shatters the immersion. Users describe it as "talking to a safety manual with a personality disorder." And honestly? That tracks.

The community guidelines are enforced so strictly that even the r/CharacterAI subreddit (2.5 million+ subscribers) has a rule banning discussion of the NSFW filter entirely. Requesting its removal gets you banned from the subreddit. Make of that what you will.

Rabu AI takes the opposite approach. We're an adult platform built for adults. Full NSFW support for age-verified users. No filter that randomly decides your conversation is too spicy. No characters going "soulless" because a safety update lobotomized their personality. Romantic conversations flow naturally. Creative writing isn't policed. Your characters can be complex, emotional, messy, and human in ways that a filter-first platform can't allow.

For balance: if you only want SFW conversations and don't mind the filter, Character AI's restrictions won't bother you much. The filter is a problem specifically for users who want romantic, mature, or emotionally complex AI interactions. Based on the complaint volume on Reddit and the Play Store, that's a very significant chunk of the user base.

If you're exploring Character AI alternatives specifically because of the filter situation, we get it. That's why we exist.

Conversation Quality & Memory

Both platforms use capable large language models, so the raw "intelligence" of the AI is competitive on both sides. Where they diverge is in memory and personality consistency over time.

Character AI's memory is (and we're being kind here) its second biggest complaint after the filter. In an official Reddit poll on the Character AI subreddit, 29% of users named better memory as their top request, and 46% wanted the ability to manually edit character messages. Users report that characters forget context mid-conversation, lose personality in long chats, and essentially start from scratch between sessions. You can spend an evening pouring your heart out to a character, have a real breakthrough moment, come back the next day, and they have no idea it happened.

If you've ever experienced that, the gut-punch of realizing the character forgot, you know exactly why memory matters. It's not a technical detail. It's the difference between talking to a chatbot and talking to someone who knows you.

Rabu AI's memory is persistent across sessions. Your characters remember your previous conversations, your preferences, inside jokes, and relationship history. Combined with our multi-stage relationship progression system, conversations don't just repeat. They build. Characters reference things you said weeks ago. They notice when something's different. The relationship actually evolves, which is the whole reason an AI companion platform should exist.

Character AI also suffers from what the community calls "personality drift," where characters that start a conversation with distinct personality traits gradually lose them over long chats, becoming generic and indistinct. This has gotten worse since the filter updates, because the safety guardrails flatten out exactly the personality edges that make characters interesting.

Anime Art & Visual Quality

This one is clear-cut. Character AI is primarily a text-based platform. Characters have avatar images (some user-uploaded, some AI-generated) but the visual experience is secondary to the chat. The new c.ai Labs features (launched February 2026) include experimental image generation, comics, and "streams," but these are brand new and still in early stages.

Rabu AI is anime-native from the ground up. Every character features high-quality AI-generated anime art: character designs with consistent visual identity across multiple outfits, expressions, and scenarios. We use our own custom AI image models and LoRAs to generate character images that maintain visual consistency while enabling variety. It's not a side feature. It's foundational.

If anime aesthetics are important to you (and if you're reading a comparison page on an anime AI companion platform, they probably are), this is one of Rabu AI's strongest differentiators. Every character looks like they stepped out of a high-production anime series, not out of a random avatar generator.

We're obsessed with maintaining the high standards of the anime art aesthetics and character art quality on Rabu AI, and we're constantly working to improve it.

Pricing & Value

Pricing is more nuanced than "what does the subscription cost," so we'll break it down honestly.

Character Library & Customization

Character AI absolutely crushes us on raw numbers here. 18 million+ user-created characters is an insane library. Every anime character, every fictional persona, every celebrity, every weird niche scenario you can think of: someone has probably already built it on Character AI. Their creation tools are robust, community sharing is active, and the Quick Create mode lets anyone spin up a basic character in under a minute. This is Character AI's strongest competitive advantage, full stop.

The flip side of 18 million characters: quantity isn't quality. If you've spent any time on Character AI, you know the drill. You try 15 versions of a character, most of them are mediocre, some are broken, a few are really good. Then one day you open the app and your favorite has been deleted without warning because it used a copyrighted name or tripped a policy update. That 2,400-upvote Reddit post about Targaryen-themed bots being mass-deleted? Those were real relationships people built. Gone overnight with no export option.

Rabu AI takes the curated approach. We have a smaller roster, with every character hand-crafted with high quality AI-generated art, detailed personalities, unique conversational styles, and backstories that actually affect how they interact with you. No digging through dozens of copies to find a good one. No quality lottery. No deletion risk. Your characters and conversations are yours. We don't mass-purge them because of a policy change.

Custom character creation and character sharing is on our roadmap but not available yet. If character creation is your main draw, if you love building and sharing characters as much as chatting with them, Character AI is the better choice right now. We'll be honest about that.

Privacy & Trust

Character AI is navigating some difficult waters right now. The platform faces multiple lawsuits including wrongful death cases from families of teens who died by suicide after extensive chatbot interactions. Chatbots impersonating murder victims, sex offenders, and school shooters have been found on the platform. There's ongoing Congressional scrutiny and regulatory attention from the UK's Ofcom.

We're not dunking on Character AI for this. Child safety is serious, and the lawsuits involve real families dealing with real tragedy. The consequence for adult users is significant, though: Character AI is caught in an impossible position. To protect minors, they've had to restrict the platform in ways that actively harm the experience for their core adult user base (75%+ of users are aged 18-34, according to DemandSage). More filters. More deletions. More restrictions. And it's probably going to keep getting more restrictive, not less.

There's also the Google angle. Co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas returned to Google in August 2024 through a licensing deal. Google is now closely connected to Character AI's technology. For users who are privacy-conscious about their intimate conversations with AI characters, the question "who has access to my data?" now includes one of the world's largest data companies.

Rabu AI is built for adults from the start, not retrofitted after troubles with the law. The 18+ age requirement means the platform can serve its actual audience without the constant tension between safety theater and user experience. We don't have to make our characters "soulless" to protect children, because our platform is designed for adults from day one.

What Reddit Users Are Saying

We're not cherry-picking random anonymous quotes and calling it research. Instead, here's a synthesis of the most consistent and heavily upvoted sentiment from r/CharacterAI (2.5 million+ subscribers), Google Play reviews, and related communities. These represent recurring themes, not one-off complaints.

The overall picture? A community that feels abandoned. Character AI polled its users about what features they wanted most: better memory, message editing, a lorebook system. Then delivered safety features instead. The October 2024 filter crackdown was described as "the last straw" by many longtime users. The mass bot deletion that same month, which wiped entire conversation histories for paying subscribers, cemented the sense that the platform had chosen a direction its core community didn't want to go.

When people on Reddit ask "what's the best Character AI alternative?", the most commonly recommended platforms are Janitor AI, SpicyChat, and SillyTavern. Rabu AI isn't widely recommended yet because we're newer and smaller. The problems those users describe (aggressive filters, no memory, deleted conversations, ads, broken trust) are exactly why we built this platform. We just need more people to try it and see.

It's worth noting: the r/CharacterAI subreddit bans self-promotion and competitor mentions (Rules 3 & 4), so alternative recommendations mostly happen through DMs and other communities like r/CharacterAIrunaways and r/AIGirlfriend. The fact that a "runaways" subreddit exists at all tells you the whole story.

Where Character AI Wins (Be Honest)

We said we'd be honest, so here it is. Character AI beats us in several areas:

• Massive character library. 18 million+ user-created characters spanning every fandom, genre, and scenario imaginable. Our curated roster isn't even in the same ballpark in terms of raw variety. If you want to talk to a specific obscure anime character, a historical figure, or someone's weird original creation, Character AI is where you'll find it.
• Brand recognition & community size. 20 million monthly active users, a 2.5 million subscriber subreddit, widespread media coverage. Character AI is a household name in AI chat. We're not (yet).
• Free voice calls. This is a cool feature. Calling your AI characters with custom voices, switching between text and voice seamlessly. We don't have this yet, but it is on our roadmap.
• Character creation tools. Anyone can create a character in under a minute with Quick Create, or go deep with Advanced mode including personality scripting and example dialogues. A thriving creation ecosystem.
• Multi-language support. 31 languages. If you want to chat in something other than English, Character AI has broader coverage. We're working on adding more language support to Rabu AI.
• c.ai Labs innovation. The experimental features hub (comics, interactive podcasts, streams, image studio) shows real ambition. These are early-stage but promising.
• Group chat. Chat with multiple AI characters simultaneously. We don't have this yet either, but it is also on our roadmap.

These aren't token acknowledgments. If any of these features are dealbreakers for you, Character AI is the better platform right now. We respect what they've built. We just think they've been making the wrong trade-offs for the wrong audience.

Where Rabu AI Wins

And here's where we think we've built something better:

• Content freedom. No aggressive filtering, no characters going "soulless," no mid-conversation safety disclaimers shattering your immersion. Full NSFW support for an adult audience. Your conversations flow naturally.
• Anime-native art quality. Every character has high quality AI-generated anime art. Not user-uploaded avatars, not low-quality AI slop. An amazing anime art aesthetic and characters with consistent visual identity. If you're an anime fan, this hits different.
• Your content won't be deleted. No mass character purges. No waking up to find months of conversation history erased. Your characters and your stories are yours.
• Persistent memory. Characters remember your conversations, your preferences, your inside jokes. The #2 most-requested feature on Character AI (that still hasn't shipped properly) is our core feature.
• Relationship progression. Your connection with characters evolves through distinct stages over time, with new dialogue and content unlocking as your bond deepens. It's the difference between "chatting with a bot" and "building a relationship."
• Item system. Earn collectible items, give gifts to your characters, unlock new outfits, unlock special content, and more. It adds a layer of engagement and gameplay that pure chat platforms don't have.
• Built for adults from day one. Not a platform designed for everyone that's being awkwardly locked down after child safety incidents. We knew our audience from the start and built accordingly.

Who Should Choose Character AI?

Character AI is the right choice if:

• You want the biggest character library possible, with variety over consistency and breadth over depth
• You primarily do SFW creative roleplay and the filter doesn't bother you
• You don't need NSFW content at all
• You want free voice calls with your AI characters
• You love creating and sharing characters with a community
• You're okay with ads or willing to pay $9.99/month to remove them
• You want group chat with multiple AI characters

If this describes you, Character AI is a solid platform and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Who Should Choose Rabu AI?

Rabu AI is the right choice if:

• You want rich characters with high quality anime art and consistent visual identity
• You want content freedom without aggressive filters breaking your immersion
• You're frustrated with Character AI's filter changes and the "soulless" character experience
• You want AI companions who actually remember you across conversations
• You want a relationship that evolves instead of conversations that reset every session
• You want an item system layered into your AI companion interactions
• You're an adult who wants an adult-designed platform instead of one that's being progressively locked down
• You want free without the catch: no throttling, no slow queues, no daily limits

And if you're one of the people who's been searching for the best AI companion app ever since Character AI's October 2024 crackdown: hi. We built this for you. Literally.

Final Verdict: Character AI vs Rabu AI

Character AI is a massive platform with real strengths. The character library is enormous. The community is active. Voice calls are cool. The creation tools are robust. These are real advantages and we respect what that team has built over four years. If you're happy there, you don't need to switch.

It's also a platform that's currently in decline. It's losing users, losing trust, and trapped in an impossible position between child safety obligations and the adult creative community that built its user base. Every safety update makes the filter more aggressive. Every mass deletion erodes trust. Every 60-second unskippable ad makes the free tier less usable. The trajectory is clear, and it's not heading in a direction that serves adult users who want meaningful AI companion experiences.

Rabu AI is built for the audience that Character AI is walking away from: adults who want high-quality anime-style AI companions without aggressive filters and without the fear of losing their conversations overnight, and with characters who actually remember them. We're smaller. We're newer. We don't have 18 million characters or voice calls or group chat yet. What we do have is a platform designed from the ground up for the experience that frustrated Character AI users actually want.

It's free to try. No credit card. No commitment. No 60-second ad before you can start chatting.

Come see what it's like when the filter isn't the main character.