Backyard AI vs HammerAI
Backyard AI
backyard.ai
HammerAI
hammerai.comSide by side
| Figure | Backyard AI | HammerAI |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $12/mo | $9/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 10 |
| Spec score · AI Roleplay Chatbots | 9.5 (#1) | 9.2 (#4) |
| Company legal name | The service terms identify Ahoy Labs, Inc. as the company. | The Apple App Store identifies the seller as Sunspot LLC. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation covers character prompts, response formatting, lorebooks, author notes, grammars, model parameters and advanced tips. | Official docs cover installation, Ollama, Linux, vision models, characters, chat, lorebooks, personas, stories, image generation, quantization, proxy models and model parameters. |
| Group chats | Parties support chatting with up to four AI characters simultaneously. | The service supports conversations with up to ten characters simultaneously. |
| Lorebooks | Lorebooks inject keyword-triggered background information into recent chat context; entries are capped at 384 combined tokens. | Lorebooks provide dynamic memory for world facts and story context. |
| Praise: roleplay quality | An Apple reviewer praised the clean interface, broad character hub, fast streaming responses and usefulness for roleplay, writing and general chat. | DreamGen reviewers reported strong character consistency, dynamic prose, useful model controls and good image results. |
| Rating on Apple App Store | 3.4 out of 5 from 37 ratings | 3.2 out of 5 from 17 ratings |
| Support | The plans page directs users with questions to contact the company by email. | Users can submit feedback in-app or contact HammerAI through Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok. |
| What it does | Backyard AI provides AI-powered character chats for text adventures, interactive stories and roleplaying. | HammerAI provides AI character roleplay, interactive story writing, image generation and text-to-speech. |
Plans
Backyard AI
- Desktop AppFree
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Standard$12 a month
- Standard$12 a month
- Pro$35 a month
- Pro$35 a month
HammerAI
- FreeFree
- Tiny credit pack$1.99, paid once
- Small credit pack$4.99, paid once
- Starter$9 a month
- Medium credit pack$9.99, paid once
- Advanced$18 a month
- Large credit pack$19.99, paid once
- Ultimate$35 a month
- Mega credit pack$49.99, paid once
- Ultra credit pack$99.99, paid once
In their own words
Backyard AI
Backyard AI offers AI-powered characters for fictional text and voice chats, including text adventures, interactive stories, and roleplaying. Its Community Hub lets users explore thousands of characters, which can be customized with lorebooks, an author's note, grammars, and model parameters. Group chats can include up to four characters, and voice calls are listed as a feature. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 300 messages per week, one model, and 16k maximum memory. The free desktop app runs local models offline; the listed download is for macOS Intel. Local models can also be accessed from a mobile browser or iOS app through opt-in tethering. Cloud subscriptions provide hosted models, with choices and limits varying by tier. Standard costs $12 a month and includes unlimited messages with Standard models; Pro costs $35 a month and includes Standard and Pro models with a 100,000-token maximum context. Backyard AI supports GGUF models, but not FP16, GPTQ, or AWQ files. Its listed platforms are Android, iOS, macOS, and web.
HammerAI
HammerAI is an AI character chat and roleplay platform for chatting with characters, writing stories, generating images, and creating group chats, lorebooks, and personas. It is available on the web, Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its desktop app runs local models through Ollama, supports 20+ LLMs, and can use an Ollama Modelfile. After models are downloaded, local-model use works offline; cloud LLMs, image generation, and text-to-speech need an internet connection. Mobile apps store chats and characters on-device by default. HammerAI says it does not collect information about conversations or use user content to train or fine-tune its models, though third-party AI providers may process or retain messages sent to them. The free plan includes 600 cloud messages per day. Paid subscriptions start at $9 a month, and unused subscription credits expire at the end of each billing period. The service is for people at least 18 or the local age of consent, whichever is greater, and filters content including self-harm encouragement, graphic violence, and hate speech.