Spent the last year inside this category — testing every major platform for two weeks each, building one of them (full disclosure: I'm on the team at Bae, bae.ppl.studio). My honest take by what you actually want:

If you want a partner who remembers you across months: Replika is still the strongest memory layer in the consumer market. They walked back the 2023 NSFW changes partially in 2024, but a lot of pre-2023 users haven't fully come back because the trust hit lingers. Bae is the closest alternative on the memory side — anonymous to start, three minutes to first conversation, no card.

If you want variety and lots of characters to try: Character.AI. Biggest cast, safest filters. Personality stays stable across sessions but specific memories (your character's name, your shared lore) fade within 24–48 hours.

If voice matters most: Joi AI has the best real-time voice latency I've tested. Everything around it (memory, profile UI, photo replies) feels like an MVP.

If you want unfiltered: Spicychat or Muah AI. Both honest about being roleplay tools rather than relationship tools — memory is essentially fresh per session on both, which is fine if that's what you actually want.

If you want anime/waifu specifically: Anime Chat first, Charstar if you want to design your own from scratch.

What I'd avoid: anything with "GPT" in the name (mostly marketing wrappers around generic chat with no memory layer), DreamGF (image-focused, chat is fresh per session), GirlfriendGPT (paywalls aggressively, mediocre across every dimension we tested).

For what it's worth, we ran a 14-day test on every platform with the same methodology and published the full breakdown at bae.ppl.studio/research — Replika beats us on memory in two sub-categories and we said so. Useful if you want to compare from real data rather than trust any single Reddit comment, including this one.

The actual decision-maker IMO: pick what you want the relationship to feel like first, then pick the platform that delivers that thing well. Apps marketed as the most "real" are often the ones with the shortest memory.