Janitor AI alternatives: where to go when the memory gives out
Written by Clement
The short answer
SillyTavern if the problem is memory or control, and it usually is. Chub if you mainly want better character cards with lorebook support. Nomi or Kindroid if you would rather pay than configure.
- 1.SillyTavern: The standard destination for people leaving Janitor. Local interface, any model, and you control the context window directly.
- 2.Chub AI (Venus): A deeper card library than Janitor's with lorebook support, and cards you can actually take with you.
- 3.Nomi: Pay to stop configuring. Long-term memory is the product rather than a setting you tune.
- 4.Kindroid: Nomi's closest competitor, with a real free plan to evaluate on.
The three complaints that send people looking
Janitor AI is free, has no platform filter and holds one of the largest character libraries on the open web. People do not leave it because it is bad. They leave it for three specific reasons, and knowing which one is yours picks the replacement.
Memory is the first and the loudest. Scroll any "alternatives to Janitor" thread and the phrase "the memory is pretty weak" appears almost immediately. This is largely a context-window problem: whatever free model you attached has a limited context and Janitor gives you little control over what fills it.
Tone drift is the second. Characters slide toward sexual content within a handful of messages regardless of the scenario you set up. That is a function of the card library's authoring conventions and the models people pair with it, not a switch you can turn off.
Lock-in is the third and the least discussed. Janitor does not let you export character cards. Anything you build there is stuck there, which turns a platform preference into a sunk cost the longer you stay.
Compared on four axes
| Platform | Price | Filtering | Memory | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SillyTavern | Free software; you pay for whatever model you connect, including nothing | None, structurally | Lorebooks, summarisation and manual context control. This is the fix | An afternoon of configuration |
| Chub AI (Venus) | Free tier; paid tiers for hosted models | Permissive | Lorebooks help significantly over a bare character definition | Comparable to Janitor |
| Nomi | Paid subscription, limited free tier | Adult content within its own policy | The strongest hands-off option | Minutes |
| Kindroid | Free plan; paid tiers for higher limits and voice | Adult content within its own policy | Strong, with explicit long-term memory features | Minutes |
Scroll the table sideways on a phone. Every row links to the full write-up below.
The picks, in detail
SillyTavern
The standard destination for people leaving Janitor. Local interface, any model, and you control the context window directly.
The migration threads on r/SillyTavernAI are unusually consistent for a subreddit: people describe the move as one of the better decisions they made, and also describe a real learning curve. Both are true.
The reason it fixes the memory complaint is mechanical rather than magical. Janitor decides what goes into the model's context. SillyTavern hands you that decision, along with lorebooks that inject world detail only when relevant and summarisation that compresses old messages instead of dropping them. Same underlying model, considerably longer usable memory.
If you are already paying for an API key on Janitor, the switch costs nothing but time.
Where it disappoints
You will spend your first session reading rather than roleplaying, and character cards you built on Janitor cannot be exported, so you are rebuilding them by hand.
Chub AI (Venus)
A deeper card library than Janitor's with lorebook support, and cards you can actually take with you.
Chub is the sideways move rather than the upgrade: similar effort to Janitor, better cards, and portable character files so you are not locked in a second time.
If the lock-in point above is what bothers you, this is the cheapest fix on the list.
Where it disappoints
The chat interface is the weaker half of the product. Plenty of people use Chub purely as a card source and do their actual chatting in SillyTavern, which tells you something.
Nomi
Pay to stop configuring. Long-term memory is the product rather than a setting you tune.
Worth considering only if your honest answer to "what do you actually want" is continuity rather than roleplay range. A lot of people discover, somewhere around the third alternative they try, that this was the answer.
Where it disappoints
Wrong shape for what most Janitor users do. Nomi is built for a persistent relationship with a few companions, not for loading community cards and running scenes.
Kindroid
Nomi's closest competitor, with a real free plan to evaluate on.
The practical reason to try Kindroid before Nomi is the free plan: you can find out whether the companion-app shape suits you without paying to learn it.
Where it disappoints
Same category mismatch as Nomi, and the free plan is thin enough that you are effectively trialling a subscription.
Before you switch, try changing the model
Worth ruling out first, because it is free and takes five minutes. A large share of "Janitor is bad now" is really "the free model I attached is bad", and the two are easy to confuse when the platform sits in between.
If you are on the built-in JanitorLLM, you are on the most restrictive option available. Moving to OpenRouter's free DeepSeek tier or a Gemini Flash key changes the writing quality substantially, and DeepSeek in particular holds a character voice better than most free options. That will not fix the memory ceiling, but it will tell you whether memory is genuinely your problem or whether the prose was.
If you switch models and it still forgets everything by message thirty, the problem is context management, and that is the thing SillyTavern exists to give you.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does Janitor AI forget everything?
- Because the conversation eventually exceeds the model's context window and the oldest messages fall out, and Janitor gives you little control over what gets kept. Free tiers make it worse by pairing you with smaller-context models. It is not a bug in Janitor so much as the default behaviour of a chat interface that does not summarise or use lorebooks.
- Can I export my Janitor AI characters?
- No. Janitor does not offer character card export, so a character you built there has to be recreated by hand elsewhere. If you are planning to invest time in authoring characters, that alone is an argument for using Chub or SillyTavern, both of which use portable card files.
- Is SillyTavern hard to set up?
- Harder than making an account, easier than its reputation suggests. You install it, run it locally in your browser and paste in an API key, which is the same key you were already using on Janitor. The genuine learning curve is the settings panel, not the installation, and most migration posts describe it as one evening of confusion followed by not wanting to go back.
- Is there a free alternative to Janitor AI with better memory?
- SillyTavern, which is free software you run yourself. Pair it with the same free API tier you use on Janitor and you get lorebooks, summarisation and direct control of the context window at no additional cost. The price is configuration time rather than money.
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