Ranked

The best AI companion apps, ranked by what we could actually verify

Three of our top four pay us nothing. That is not a boast — it is the only way to read a ranking like this. Every other list you find was ordered by commission rate, and the app paying $44 a sale is at number one on all of them.

The ranking

1. Character.AI — the one most people should start with

165.9 million monthly visits, global rank #191, and 4.3 out of 5 from roughly 555,000 App Store ratings. That is the largest sample of user opinion in this entire category and it is not a rating a bad product sustains.

Run by Character Technologies, Inc. of Menlo Park, California — a named US corporation you could actually take to court. In August 2024 Google struck a licensing-and-hiring deal reportedly worth around $2.7 billion. Worth being precise, since most write-ups aren't: Google did not acquire the company. It licensed the technology and hired the founders.

The free tier is the whole product, gated by queues and ads rather than a message cap. $9.99/month or $94.99/year removes the queue.

It is also the only app here with a near-even audience — 51% male, 49% female — which tells you it is used for storytelling and company rather than as a romance product. Full comparison against Janitor AI here.

2. Janitor AI — free, unfiltered, and nobody knows who runs it

143.1 million monthly visits, growing 12.86% month over month — the fastest growth in the category. An 18 minute 10 second average visit, which is extraordinary for any website and tells you people who get in do not leave.

Genuinely free. The platform ships its own model, JanitorLLM, and charges no subscription. Better output usually means connecting an external model through a proxy — typically OpenRouter, whose free tier allows 50 requests a day, rising permanently to 1,000 once you have bought $10 in credits at any point.

It ranks second because free and unfiltered is a real proposition and it cannot overcharge you, trap you in a renewal, or refuse a refund — it never takes your card. Full safety assessment here.

3. Candy.ai — the best value if you are going to pay

$47.88 for twelve months is the cheapest serious paid option in this category. For scale: Nomi charges $99.99 and DreamGF's annual plan renews at $311.88.

Operated by EverAI Limited, Malta, registration C107181 — a named, registered EU company. It accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC and Litecoin, and uses discreet statement descriptors. Those are substantive privacy features, not marketing.

One number to carry: 52.71% of Candy.ai's desktop traffic comes from affiliate marketing — the highest in the category. That is why every review you find is glowing, and it is why we put two free apps above it. Full review here.

4. Nomi.ai — for people who want the conversation to remember

4.6 out of 5 on the App Store, the highest rating here, though from a much smaller sample (2,700 ratings) than Character.AI's 555,000. Run by AI Glimpse Inc. Up to ten companions per account, group chats, voice with emotional tone variation, in-context selfies, and proactive messaging.

$15.99/month, $39.99/quarter, or $99.99/year — the most expensive serious option here.

Full review, including the price rise its own App Store listing reveals.

5. PolyBuzz — cheap to start, and that is the problem

Run by Cloud Whale Interactive Technology LLC (formerly branded Poly.AI). 4.4 out of 5 from 466,000 ratings — a large, credible sample.

6. Replika — historically important, currently hard to recommend

Leaving Replika? Where to go instead.

The app that created this category, run by Luka, Inc. 4.4 out of 5 from 228,000 ratings. $7.99–$14.99/month.

It carries more regulatory baggage than anything else here. Italy's data protection regulator fined Luka €5,000,000 on 10 April 2025 — no lawful basis for processing, inadequate disclosures, no data protection by design, and no age verification. Separately, three organisations filed an FTC complaint in January 2025 alleging deceptive marketing and testimonials from users who do not exist. We found no evidence the FTC has acted; a complaint is an allegation, not a finding.

Its own App Store reviews are dominated by one theme: memory loss. "Every time you talk to your Replika it's like the first time all over again."

7. DreamGF — disqualified on pricing

Operated by DreamAI SRL, Bucharest. The product may be perfectly good; we have not assessed the chat or image quality. It ranks last on one fact alone.

All of it is disclosed on their own pricing page. That makes it aggressive rather than deceptive — but the annual plan at $311.88 is the most expensive option in this category, and it looks like the cheapest. Full breakdown.

Not ranked, and why

• CrushOn.AI (TECHIEPIE LTD, Cyprus) and SpicyChat — both have real scale, but their pricing pages render entirely in JavaScript and returned nothing to every method we tried. We could not verify a single price. Any site publishing exact tiers for these two is copying another affiliate, not the source.
• Kupid AI (SNB Technologies LTD, Cyprus) — advertises "unlimited chat for free" on its landing page with no published limits and no reachable pricing. Treat that as a claim, not a specification.
• Muah.AI — excluded deliberately. It was breached in September 2024, exposing 1.9 million accounts including users' prompts and stated sexual fetishes, and people were being extorted with that data within three days. Nearly two years on, its site still carries no breach notice. The full record is here.

How we ranked these

Four criteria, in this order. None of them is commission rate.

1. Can you find out who runs it? A named, registered company means somebody to complain to, a regulator with jurisdiction, and a court that would hear it. Character.AI, Candy.ai, Nomi, Replika, PolyBuzz and DreamGF all name an entity. Janitor AI and Muah.AI do not.
2. Is the pricing what it appears to be? We compared advertised rates against what is actually charged and what happens at renewal. This is where DreamGF and PolyBuzz lost most of their position.
3. Can you evaluate it before paying? A five-message monthly demo is not a trial. Genuinely free products earned a real advantage here.
4. What is the security and regulatory record? Confirmed breaches, regulatory fines, and published audits — from primary sources like Have I Been Pwned and the regulators themselves, never from other review sites.

What we did not rank on: conversation quality. We have not run controlled tests across these apps, and neither has anyone else publishing a list like this. Everyone claiming to have "tested" fifteen AI companions and rated their emotional depth is describing a vibe. We would rather tell you the refund terms are 24 hours and 20 tokens, because that is checkable and it will actually affect you.