We Tested the Best Sudowrite Alternatives on the Market

June 30, 2024

Helpful Summary

Overview: We share five alternatives to Sudowrite—a popular AI writing assistant for creative writers and authors.
Why you can trust us: We base our reviews on hands-on experience and years of experience building and using AI tools.
Why this is important: Whether you’re a professional wordsmith, a diligent student, or a budding novelist, we’ve done the research to help you find the perfect tool for your needs.
Action points: The alternatives discussed are DreamGen, Character AI, Novelcrafter, ChatGPT, and CoWriter AI.
Further research: Check out the DreamGen blog for more reviews, guides, and tutorials.

Looking for the Best Sudowrite Alternative?

In a sea of AI writing tools, Sudowrite stands out as one of the few options specifically designed for creative writing, not business writing. It’s a great tool with a lot going for it… but it definitely isn’t for everyone.

In this guide, DreamGen compares the five Sudowrite alternatives that address some of the limitations and issues users have experienced with Sudowrite. Whether you’re a professional wordsmith, a diligent student, or a budding novelist, we’ve done the research to help you find the perfect tool for your needs.

But first…

Why Listen to Us?

At DreamGen, we’ve worked hard to develop an affordable, unrestricted, and, most of all, fun alternative to Sudowrite.

We base our reviews on hands-on research, testing, and analysis with the tools we discuss. Our goal is to provide readers with accurate, reliable, and unbiased information to help them make the right call when it comes to their software.

What Is Sudowrite?

Sudowrite is an AI-powered writing assistant designed to add a dash of magic to your creative writing process. It offers a great long-form editor and a wide range of tools that support everything from brainstorming to editing.

The underlying models Sudowrite uses are based on GPT-4 (and now GPT-4o). However, you do have the option to switch to alternative models like Claude 3 Opus if you want to. Unfortunately, this means that Sudowrite is censored by default.

Key Features

Story Bible: Build a solid foundation for your stories by telling Sudowrite about characters, structure, items, tone, and more.
Brainstorming: Get AI assistance as you brainstorm potential characters, lines of dialogue, character names, and items.
Write: Hit write, and Sudowrite will automatically generate the next 300-ish words of your book or story.
Rewrite: Give Sudowrite instructions for how you’d like a particular passage to be rewritten, and it will generate multiple options for you to choose from.
Describe: Instantly generate five-sense descriptions of any text you highlight to add depth to your writing.

Pricing

Sudowrite offers a subscription-based pricing structure with three plans:

Hobby & Student ($10/mo): 225,000 credits per month
Professional ($22/mo): 1,000,000 credits per month
Max ($44/mo): 2,000,000 credits per month

Pros

Feature-rich
Tons of plugins
Supportive community

Cons

Confusing, expensive pricing
Lots of buggy features
Censored by default

Why Look for a Sudowrite Alternative?

Sudowrite is a great tool—but it isn’t perfect. Here are the two main reasons why we’d recommend looking for alternatives:

Confusing Pricing: Sudowrite’s pricing is very confusing. Plans have set “credits”, but there’s no way to tell exactly how many credits different models and features use. A particularly ridiculous example? Sudowrite’s plugins are rated on a scale of 1 to 4 lightning bolts based on their cost, but there’s no way to tell how many credits each bolt represents. We feel this is overly convoluted, and plenty of users agree.

No Great Value: A related issue is that Sudowrite doesn’t offer the best value for money from a generation perspective. Some users have estimated that you’ll need to spend as much as $150 to generate 300K words. This is pricey compared to many alternatives, and Sudowrite has no free models when you run out of credits (like DreamGen).
Content Restrictions: Sudowrite uses GPT-based models by default. That means it can’t write NSFW content unless you switch to a model that supports this. A huge issue? No, but it is annoying having to switch back and forth, and the models they use for unrestricted content aren’t necessarily the best for prose.

5 Best Sudowrite Alternatives

Here’s a quick run-down of the tools we’ll be discussing:

DreamGen
Novelcrafter
Claude
Character AI

1. DreamGen

Coming in at number one? DreamGen. Sure, we might be a little biased, but we’re also confident that DreamGen is the best Sudowrite alternative by a mile.

We built our own AI models from scratch with the goal of giving writers like you complete creative freedom. You can write about any topic or theme you want to—no judgment, censorship, or filters.

Plus, our models are purpose-built from the ground up for prose (unlike GPT-based tools). That means outputs sound better from the jump and require much less editing to make them sound like human thoughts.

Key Features

Story-Writing Mode: Craft engaging long-form stories with the help of AI. Give instructions, rephrase sentences, and create something unique.
Role-Play Mode: Swap into role-play mode for a fun, interactive writing experience. Chat 1-to-1 or in a group chat with multiple characters.
Story Bible: Store details about your characters, settings, and plotlines for easy reference while writing. This also tells the AI about your world.
Customizable AI Settings: Personalize your AI outputs with settings for everything from tone and style to output length.
Scenario Library: Dive straight into a story by choosing one from our library of pre-written scenarios.
Scenario Generator: If none of the built-in scenarios catch your eye, generate a new one based on a simple prompt. The AI will flesh out the plot, characters and everything else for you.

Pricing

With DreamGen, the monthly credits you get from your subscription let you interact with our AI for immersive story-writing and role-playing.

Here are the plans:

Starter: Great when the smaller AI is all you need.
Advanced: Leverage the best AI model and have better AI memory.
Pro: Unlimited use of the best AI model and the largest AI memory.

We offer a generous free tier where you can try all our models and features.

Pros

Advanced scenario crafting
Enhanced editor functionality
Story Bible
Interactive story templates
Fantastic community
API Access

Cons

Slightly smaller character set compared to others

2. Novelcrafter

Novelcrafter is your AI-powered writing companion designed for fiction authors. Like Sudowrite, it’s packed with valuable tools for each step of your novel journey—from idea generation to revision. Plus, its AI is powered by advanced models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Key Features

Codex for Story Organization: Store details about your characters, plot, and world-building in one place for easy reference.
In-Text Editing and Scene Beats: Offers handy in-text editing and scene beat generation for structured storytelling and smooth, coherent narrative flow.
Chat Mode: Chat with advanced AI models to ask specific questions, brainstorm ideas, or even get feedback on your writing.

Pricing

Here are Novelcrafter’s four plans:

Scribe ($4.00/mo): Basic review features
Hobbyist ($8.00/mo): AI scene summarization
Artisan ($14.00/mo): Discord community support
Specialist ($20.00/mo): Invite others to your story

Pros

AI chat for brainstorming
Comprehensive world-building tools
Great story organization

Cons

Complex set up
In-text editing and scene continuation features are buggy

3. Claude

Claude is a super versatile AI language model that’s pretty similar to ChatGPT in many ways. Why did Claude make the cut over ChatGPT? It’s much better at creative writing tasks thanks to a more succinct and human-like generation pattern and a flexible set of content restrictions that are context-aware.

Key Features

Advanced Language Generation: Produces high-quality, context-aware text with particular strength in creative and narrative writing.
Versatility: Excellent for brainstorming, outlining, character development, and generating content across various genres and styles.
Nuanced Understanding: Demonstrates a strong grasp of narrative elements, literary techniques, and creative writing principles.

Pricing

Claude is available for free! However, to access Anthropic's best models (Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 3), you need to pay for Pro ($20/month).

Pros

Most natural language generation
Currently the smartest AI out there, excellent at following instuctions
Strong ability to maintain context and consistency
Adaptable to various writing styles and genres

Cons

Not a dedicated writing platform, making it hard to keep track of things
Requires careful prompting
Can’t write about certain topics, such as violence

4. NovelAI

Last up, NovelAI, a tool we’ve written quite a bit about. NovelAI is a Sudowrite alternative that also offers a great, AI-enabled long-form editor. It doesn’t have quite as many features as Sudowrite or DreamGen, but it does have some nice extras like Lorebook for organizing story details.

Key Features

Customizable Editor: Customize just about everything about NovelAI’s editor to turn it into the perfect writing environment.
Text Adventure Mode: Swap from long-form stories to fun, engaging role-play sessions where you control the action with do. Say, story prompts.
Custom Models: Train your own custom models to write like you or understand specific tasks at an expert level.

Pricing

NovelAI offers a nice, 100-generation free trial. After that, you can buy one of three paid plans (each offering higher context memory limits):

Tablet ($10/mo): 3,072 tokens of memory
Scroll ($15/mo): 6,144 tokens of memory
Opus ($25/mo): 8,192 tokens of memory

Pros

Great customization options with advanced interface
Non-mainstream models (designed for prose and NSFW) available

Cons

Outdated and by today’s standards not that smart AI
Very limited free trial, making it hard to test before making a purchasing decision
Interface is relatively complex at first

5. Character AI

Character AI is an AI chatbot platform that lets users create characters and chat with them. Now, this isn’t a perfect alternative to Sudowrite like DreamGen. But it is a great way to practice creative writing and role-playing, brainstorm characters and scenarios, and even get feedback from other users.

Key Features

Virtual Characters: Craft virtual characters to chat with, role-play different scenarios and plots, and explore new ideas.
Scenario Crafting: Create and save different story scenarios to develop your writing skills, practice dialogue, and come up with unique plot twists.
Character Library: Access a huge library of 40,000+ characters and chatbots for everything from fantasy creatures to historical figures.

Pricing

Character AI offers a freemium model with a free tier and a premium subscription plan known as c.ai+ ($9.99/month).

Pros

Engaging and interactive characters
Great tool for brainstorming
Simple UI and character builder

Cons

Lacks depth in conversations
Lacks advanced writing tools

Conclusion

So there you have it—a comprehensive overview of the top five alternatives to Sudowrite. If you ask us, DreamGen leads the pack thanks to our similar feature set, more affordable pricing, and completely unrestricted models that are purpose-built for prose (unlike Sudowrite’s).

Ready to get started? Try DreamGen for free today.