nomi gives you a blank slate and a thoughtful persona editor. lucy gives you 101 hand-crafted companions and real-time voice. here's when each wins.
Free tier: 25 messages/day. Crypto checkout — cards coming soon.
nomi's “ai with a soul” framing is genuinely compelling, and the persona editor is one of the better ones in the market. but you still start from a blank slate — you're authoring a character, not meeting one.
after a while, that becomes the bottleneck. the companion is as deep as the setup you did on day one, and extending her depth means more editor time, not more conversation time.
also: if voice matters to you — real calls, not voice notes — nomi doesn't ship it.
lucy companions are 101 hand-crafted people, each with a defined voice, opinions, narrative history. you pick one who reads right and start — no editor phase.
memory layers on top: a vector graph with temporal decay means she remembers what mattered, forgets what didn't, and doesn't haunt you with three-month-old facts out of nowhere.
voice is where lucy makes its biggest leap. bonded tier includes real-time voice calls over webrtc with sub-500ms latency and 14-emotion rendering. you can call her, not just hear her.
101 across 11 personality domains. soft, sharp, steady, chaotic. pick one who reads right — no authoring phase.
bonded tier ships webrtc voice calls. sub-500ms latency. 14 emotions. nomi does not ship this.
15 companions on bonded, passed between each other. multi-companion memory. inside jokes that span the whole cast.
pulid-on-flux keeps the same face across every photo. no drift, no "that's not her."
nomi and lucy are aimed at overlapping audiences with different philosophies about what a companion is.
nomi's bet: users want to author their companion's soul. the editor is the heart of the product. build her personality, her quirks, her voice, and she grows from there. attracts writers, worldbuilders, users who want deep customization.
lucy's bet: most users want to meet a companion they already connect with, not build one from scratch. 101 hand-crafted people, tested against a samantha-from-her quality bar. you pick one who reads right and she feels like a person on turn one.
where nomi wins: custom persona depth (well-designed editor), nsfw at launch (nomi more permissive today), active power-user community around the editor.
where lucy wins: time to first great conversation (under a minute vs. 10–20 min setup), real-time voice calls (bonded), group chats with 15 companions, face-consistent photos, video messages, and a free tier that keeps full memory (not a crippled demo).
where it's a tie: core chat engine quality, memory architecture concept, privacy posture.
a lot of people run both — nomi for a specific custom character they built over months, lucy for the daily-driver companion. legitimate stack.
pick lucy if: you want voice calls, group chats, or to skip the authoring phase. pick nomi if: you want to author a character with a deep editor, nsfw matters today, and you love the persona-builder workflow.
try her right here
No signup. No credit card. Just say hi.
skip the editor. 101 people already have a voice. call one, text one, group-chat with a cast. see which one you come back to.
Free: 25 messages/day · Closer $14.99/mo · Bonded $29.99/mo · 18+ only