Backyard AI vs Inkstone
Backyard AI
backyard.aiInkstone
getinkstone.comSide by side
| Figure | Backyard AI | Inkstone |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $12/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 2 |
| Spec score · AI Roleplay Chatbots | 9.5 (#1) | 8.5 (#22) |
| Characters | Users can explore thousands of characters through the Community Hub. | Users can create characters and import Character V2 cards from PNG images with embedded JSON or JSON files. |
| Lorebooks | Lorebooks inject keyword-triggered background information into recent chat context; entries are capped at 384 combined tokens. | Lorebooks dynamically add entries to prompts when their trigger terms are matched. |
| Support | The plans page directs users with questions to contact the company by email. | The maker directs users to Discord for questions, feedback, bug reports, and community discussion. |
| What it does | Backyard AI provides AI-powered character chats for text adventures, interactive stories and roleplaying. | Inkstone is a local-first AI roleplay application for chatting with characters, building worlds and writing stories while using an AI provider selected by the user. |
Plans
Backyard AI
- Desktop AppFree
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Standard$12 a month
- Standard$12 a month
- Pro$35 a month
- Pro$35 a month
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.