SillyTavern

The roleplay front-end. It is not a model: you bring one, local or hosted, and it handles characters, memory, formatting and everything around the conversation.

Self-hosted
Active
Allowed adult content
Open source

Website Source Documentation

At a glance

Where it runs: Self-hostedYou run it on your own machine. Nothing leaves it unless you send it.
Adult content: AllowedAdult content is permitted within the published rules.
Trains on your content: NoYour content is not used to train models.
Status: ActiveMaintained and working today.
Account needed: No
Licence: AGPL-3.0
Cost: Free and open source.
What it keeps: Chats, characters and settings are files in a local folder. What your chosen backend does is a separate question.

What it takes to run

Graphics memory: No GPU needed
System memory: 4 GB, 8 GB recommended
Disk: about 2 GB
Runs on: Linux, macOS, Windows, Android

Find what fits your machine on the tools page — pick your hardware from the first menu.

SillyTavern is the interface the roleplay community settled on, and its design follows from one decision: it never provides the model. You point it at KoboldCpp on your own machine, or at a hosted API, and it manages everything else — character cards, personas, world info, group chats, prompt construction, and a great deal of formatting.

Because it runs on your computer and stores its data there, your conversations are files on your disk. Which service sees them depends entirely on which backend you chose: point it at a local model and the answer is nobody.

It imposes no content policy. Whatever the backend allows is what you get.

Worth knowing before you start

Brings no model with it You must set up a backend separately. This is the point, and it is still the first hurdle.
Overwhelming number of settings The sampler and prompt-format panels assume you know what they do.

What it does

Character cards
World info and lorebooks
Group chats
Prompt templates per model
Extensions for voice and images
Works with local or hosted backends

How it relates to other tools

a frontend for Ollama
a frontend for KoboldCpp
an alternative to RisuAI
an alternative to Agnaistic
an alternative to Chub AI — a source of cards for it rather than a replacement

Signs of life

Checked automatically. These are the only figures on this page a machine wrote, and they say when they were taken.

Last answered: Yes, 3 hours ago Its website responded when we asked.
Stars on GitHub: 33,395 6,298 forks.
Last commit: 1 day ago2026-09-14 19:16 UTC
Latest release: 1.19.0
Archived copy: Wayback Machine A snapshot, in case this one stops answering.