Here’s Our Review of Novel AI for AI Story Generation (+ 5 Great Alternatives)

Last updated:August 11, 2025

Quick Summary

This article reviews NovelAI and five top alternatives for AI storytelling: DreamGen, AI Dungeon, Claude AI, DeepFiction, and DreamPress. We compare features like story generation, customization, and roleplay support, highlighting why DreamGen leads in creative control. Visit the DreamGen blog for more tools and insights on immersive storytelling.

Looking for NovelAI Alternatives for Generating Stories?

If you're into AI-driven storytelling or art generation, you've likely come across NovelAI.

While popular among creators for generating text and visuals from user input, it may not suit everyone's needs. Whether you're seeking a tool that's easier to use, offers more features, or you just want to explore new options, there are excellent alternatives available.

In this DreamGen guide, we'll explore NovelAI alongside three top alternatives to help you find the perfect platform for your AI writing journey.

Why Trust Us?

At DreamGen, we have firsthand experience empowering users to craft immersive storylines and engage in dynamic character interactions through our cutting-edge AI tool. Our expertise allows us to provide insights into the best AI storytelling and role-playing tools.

What is NovelAI?

NovelAI is a versatile AI-assisted platform designed for creative writing and storytelling, offering advanced tools for both text and image generation. NovelAI offers a comprehensive suite of features to enhance the creative process for writers of all experience levels.

Key Features

AI-Assisted Storytelling: NovelAI allows users to generate text that mimics various literary styles and genres.
Customizable Editor: Tailor your writing environment to your preferences with the theme editor. Adjust fonts, sizes, and color schemes to create a personalized workspace.
Lorebook for World-Building: Organize and track complex story elements with the Lorebook, ensuring consistency and depth in your fictional worlds.
AI Image Generation: Create visually stunning anime-style images from text prompts using advanced image models. Bring your characters and scenes to life with vibrant visuals.
Text Adventure: Engage in interactive storytelling with the text adventure feature, allowing you to experience and influence narratives in real-time.
Memory Storage: Use up to 8,192 memory tokens, enabling the AI to maintain context and detail in complex narratives.

Pricing

NovelAI offers a limited free trial with 50 AI generations. These don’t reset monthly, so you’ll want to use them carefully.
Paid plans are available across three categories: Writer, AI Artist, and Both. All tiers unlock access to text generation, expanded memory, image tools, and Anlas bonuses and discounts.

Top Picks: Best NovelAI Alternatives Worth Trying

Not all AI storytelling tools are built the same. Below are the three standout options, each excelling in a different area depending on what you're looking for:

DreamGen – Best for Roleplay and Story Control: DreamGen gives you full control over characters, plot, and style, ideal for roleplayers, worldbuilders, and writers who want complete creative freedom without filters.
Claude AI – Best for Longform and Consistency: With its massive context window and strong reasoning capabilities, Claude AI is perfect for writers working on detailed, consistent longform projects.
AI Dungeon – Best for Real-Time Interactive Stories: AI Dungeon is built for dynamic storytelling. If you want a sandbox-style experience with branching dialogue and world interaction, this is the go-to.

Our Top 3 NovelAI Alternatives

1. DreamGen

If you’ve ever wished you could truly control every aspect of your stories or role-plays, DreamGen was built for you.

Unlike other tools that limit you to single-character chats or rigid prompts, DreamGen gives you complete creative freedom to craft complex worlds, steer plots in real time, and interact with multiple characters simultaneously.

Whether you’re a writer building an epic saga or a role-player exploring branching narratives, DreamGen’s powerful features let you shape every detail of your story exactly the way you imagine it, without filters or unnecessary restrictions.

Key Features

Unrestricted Creative Freedom: DreamGen models don't put limits on your creativity—write whatever stories, characters, and ideas you want.
Role-Play Mode: Engage in dynamic, chat-based adventures with multiple AI characters, where you can freely edit, delete, or add messages, something most alternatives can’t match.
AI Story Generator: Create fully-fledged stories across any genre. Define the plot, tone, and character arcs, and the AI will handle the narrative development.
Scenario Codex (Story Bible): Organize characters, plot, setting, style, and lore in a centralized, editable codex that guides your entire story or role-play.
Scenario Wizard & Importer: Instantly generate rich, ready-to-play scenarios with the Wizard or import existing characters from platforms like Janitor AI or Chub.
Story/Role-Play Assistant: Built-in helper provides suggestions for plot twists, rewrites, or new characters whenever you need inspiration or guidance.
Generous Free Tier: Access all features with monthly and daily credits for messages and image generation, allowing substantial creative freedom without paying.
Image Generation: Create high-quality AI images in various styles to illustrate your stories or role-plays directly from prompts.

Pricing

We offer a generous free plan that gives you access to all core features, including role-play, story mode, scenario tools, and image generation.
Three paid plans are available for those who want expanded AI capabilities, longer memory for more cohesive stories, and unlimited usage of the most advanced models

2. AI Dungeon

AI Dungeon is one of the original pioneers of AI-driven interactive storytelling. As a player, you get the freedom to explore open-ended adventures where the AI responds to every action in real-time.

It was initially popular for its flexibility, but recent changes have made it more focused on gaming experiences rather than deep narrative creation or multi-character roleplay.

Key Features

Interactive Adventures: Players guide the story through typed inputs, with the AI adapting instantly to user choices in a wide range of settings, from fantasy to sci-fi.
Multiplayer Mode: Play solo or invite friends to co-create stories and explore collaborative adventures in real time.
User-Generated Content: Build and share your own scenarios with the community, allowing for a wide range of creative and fan-made narratives.
Genre Flexibility: While fantasy is the default, the platform supports multiple genres and lets you define the setting and characters.
AI Options: Choose between different AI models, including access to premium models with better coherence and storytelling quality.
Flexible World-Building: Customize every element of your adventure, from character roles and personalities to setting themes and narrative tone, for a fully tailored experience.

Pricing

AI Dungeon uses a tiered subscription model starting with a free plan for basic gameplay.

Adventurer: Offers unlimited access to basic image generation.
Champion: Includes a monthly credit allowance for AI interactions and enhancements.
Legend: Provides a higher credit tier for more advanced image or text generation.
Mythic: Unlocks unlimited access to premium, speed-boosted AI models for uninterrupted storytelling.

3. Claude AI

Developed by Anthropic, Claude AI is a powerful writing assistant built for long-form content creation, structured reasoning, and in-depth storytelling.

With recent updates, the platform now handles creative tasks with more nuance, consistency, and memory than before, making it a stronger choice for writers, researchers, and collaborative teams alike.

Key Features

Flexible Writing Support: The platform helps with content creation across different formats, including technical writing, storytelling, and complex documents.
Advanced Long-Form Writing: Claude supports up to 100,000 tokens of memory, ideal for keeping track of extended plots, characters, and narrative threads.
Creative & Context-Aware: With recent upgrades, Claude produces more natural dialogue, in-character writing, and structured fiction across genres.
Project-Based Collaboration: The new Team plan includes a project management system for multi-document workflows, perfect for co-writing or serialized fiction.
Multilingual Capabilities: Generate or edit content in multiple languages with strong fluency and style retention.
Ethical AI Design: Claude is built around safety and transparency principles, prioritizing thoughtful content generation.

Pricing

Claude’s subscription options are simple and flexible:

Free Plan: Access to Claude 3.7 Sonnet for everyday writing and experiments.
Pro Plan: Unlocks Claude 4 Opus, higher usage limits, and stronger writing performance.
Team Plan: Everything in Pro, plus shared projects, extended context (200K tokens), and collaborative features for teams or co-authors.

4. DeepFiction AI

DeepFiction AI is built for storytellers who want to shape not just the narrative, but the entire storytelling experience, from dialogue and pacing to visuals and genre tone. It removes restrictive filters and gives you the tools to write anything you imagine.

Unlike NovelAI’s text-only focus and limited story control, DeepFiction also supports AI-generated images and videos that match your story scenes.

Key Features

Multi-Modal Creativity: Generate images and videos that reflect your prompts and scenes, ideal for visual storytellers.
Personalized Output: The AI adapts to your style preferences to produce more consistent, coherent stories over time.
Real-Time Role-Play: Create unique AI characters for conversation-based storytelling, complete with personalities and backstories.
User-Driven Library: Browse and share user-generated stories, building off an evolving content community.
No Genre Limitations: Whether you're building a post-apocalyptic survival tale or a slice-of-life romance, DeepFiction won’t force you into a mold.

Pricing

DeepFiction offers a flexible, credit-based subscription model with three tiers.
You can choose a lightweight plan if you’re just exploring, or go unlimited for high-volume storytelling and media generation.
All plans include story, image, and video generation features, with higher tiers unlocking faster speeds and expanded capacity.

5. DreamPress AI

DreamPress AI is a unique narrative generator that leans into subconscious creativity. It’s designed to turn your surreal, abstract, or dreamlike thoughts into polished stories using a guided AI writing system.

While it's especially strong in speculative and unfiltered storytelling, it’s also capable of producing broader genres with a focus on user involvement and memory management. It offers more interactivity, allowing you to update and steer the narrative with precision.

Key Features

Dream Journal–Inspired Writing: Build stories from dream prompts, ideas, or abstract concepts with an AI trained to translate them into compelling narratives.
Editable Chapter & Character Memory: Maintain story consistency by manually updating chapter summaries and toggling character presence, especially useful for long-form projects.
AI Memory Controls: Use descriptions and background info sections to store important plot points and world-building details. The AI references these to stay on track.
Story Rewrite Options: If the AI veers off course or repeats itself, you can easily revise or regenerate specific sections using dedicated tools.
Erotica-Friendly Output: While not limited to NSFW content, DreamPress excels in unrestricted storytelling across adult genres.
Image Generation: Use an integrated visual tool to create custom illustrations that match your scenes or characters.

Pricing

DreamPress offers a single Unlimited Plan that includes unlimited story tokens, up to 2,000 image generations per month, and the ability to export and fully own your stories.

The plan also provides a clean, polished interface with no wait times and flexible cancellation.

Why Consider a NovelAI Alternative?

While NovelAI offers a range of features, it may not be the perfect fit for everyone. We tried Novel AI and read numerous reviews to identify issues that lead users to seek alternatives.

Here’s an overview:

Creative Limitations: NovelAI’s content generation is powered by older and smaller AI models. Hence we find its output lacking in depth and originality.
Not Suitable for Chat or Role-Playing: NovelAI is primarily focused on creative writing or image generation. It doesn’t support chat-based interactions or role-playing scenarios.
Limited Story Features: NovelAI excels at generating stories and poems but may fall short in collaborative tools, templates for various writing styles, and other advanced functionalities.
Need for Active Guidance: NovelAI often requires significant user input and guidance to achieve desired story outputs, which may not suit those seeking a more automated writing assistant.

How DreamGen Compares to Other NovelAI Alternatives

We've highlighted key differentiators that matter most to story-focused users, especially those who value customization, creative freedom, and AI control.

Feature	DreamGen	Claude AI	AI Dungeon	DeepFiction	DreamPress
Multi-Character Roleplay	✅ Yes	❌ No	🤔 Limited	✅ Yes	❌ No
Scenario & Style Control	✅ Full	✅ Partial	🤔 Some control	✅ Moderate	✅ Manual
Steerable AI via Instructions	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	❌ No	❌ No	✅ Manual Edits
Image Generation Included	✅ Yes	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Open Source / API Access	✅ Yes	❌ No	❌ No	❌ No	❌ No
Unfiltered Storytelling	✅ No Filter	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ No Filter	✅ Adult Focus
Scenario Wizard / Auto Generator	✅ Yes	❌ No	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ No

As the table shows, DreamGen stands alone in offering the deepest narrative control, true multi-character roleplay, and built-in creative tools across both roleplay and story modes.

Unlock Your Writing Potential With DreamGen

Adopting AI in creative fields like storytelling can transform the way writers and creators approach their craft. Having explored NovelAI and its alternatives, it’s clear that each tool has its own strengths.

Among these, DreamGen shines as a top choice because of its versatility. It offers unrestricted storytelling possibilities, dynamic narrative control, and the ability to interact with multiple characters seamlessly.

Whether you’re an experienced author or just beginning your creative journey, DreamGen provides a flexible environment to inspire and enhance your craft.

Get started today for free.