Character.AI
Companion and roleplay chat at consumer scale.
Full Character.AI record →Head to head
Character.AI (Character.AI) and ERNIE Bot (Baidu) both sit in Writing. ERNIE Bot is the cheaper entry point at Pay-as-you-go API pricing based on tokens. Token Plan Personal Edition and some free trials available.. ERNIE Bot shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (25 vs 0). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | Character.AI Character.AI | ERNIE Bot Baidu |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Writing | Writing |
| Version | 2025 | 5.0-thinking-preview |
| Entry cost | Free tier · from $9.99/mo | Pay-as-you-go API pricing based on tokens. Token Plan Personal Edition and some free trials available. |
| Pricing tiers | — | Token Plan Personal Edition / Pay-as-you-go free |
| Model stack | in-house models | DeepSeek-V3.1 · ERNIE 4.5 (open weights) · ERNIE 4.5 Turbo · ERNIE 4.5 Turbo VL · ERNIE 4.5 VL 28B A3B · ERNIE 5.0 · ERNIE X1.1 Preview · ernie-4.5-turbo-128k · ERNIE-5.0-Thinking-Preview |
| Context window | — | 119k |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 0 | 25 |
| Origin | Global | China |
| Capabilities | Character creation, Voice, Feed | Multimodal input, Search integration, Digital humans, Enterprise Qianfan platform, Multi-Agent, RAG, Multimodal, OCR |
Companion and roleplay chat at consumer scale.
Full Character.AI record →Baidu's assistant (Wenxin Yiyan), backed by the ERNIE model line and integrated into Baidu Search.
Full ERNIE Bot record →