Start with the memory line
Two companion apps can look the same in a store listing and behave very differently after a week of chats. The line that tells them apart is memory, the part that carries one session into the next. Read that line before price, because it decides whether a conversation restarts every time or continues where you left it.
AI Angels lists Persistent memory across sessions, free tier, so its memory claim sits on a free tier. Backyard AI lists memory up to 100,000 tokens on Pro, which attaches the same idea to a named plan. Nothing about the feature is hidden in either line. What changes is who pays for it, and that shows up only in the wording.
Separate length of recall from depth of recall
AIGirlfriends.ai makes the longest claim in this group. Remembers chats across weeks and months, put in weeks and months rather than sessions. That is a retention promise, and it is the kind you can check yourself by opening a new chat and asking about a detail from an earlier one.
Others describe continuity in narrower terms. Candy.ai lists Remembers chat context and persona, so the persona survives along with the thread. Baratnoim.hu lists Remembers chat history and preferences, and Botify AI lists Remembers themes across sessions. ChatVika's line reads Characters remember you across conversations, which puts the weight on the character knowing you rather than on storing the transcript.
Preference memory is a different promise from conversation memory
AI Punca lists Adapts to user preferences, a claim about the app learning your taste. AI Podruga lists remembers all conversations, a much wider claim about keeping everything. AIAllure lists Deep conversational memory retained. Three short lines, three different ideas, and the gap between them matters more than the shared word memory.
Write the three claims on a list and ask which one matches what you want. Learning your taste changes what a companion suggests. Keeping every conversation changes how much of a past exchange can return, which is also the part worth raising when you want your history gone.
Media sets the daily habit
Voice is the feature most people reach for first, and it has the widest spread here. Baibu is the clearest case: it has voice, and it has neither image generation nor video generation. For a reader who only ever talks to the app, that is a lean product with a shorter list of things to pay for.
The other direction runs through most of the list. AI Angels, AIAllure, AIGirlfriends.ai, Botify AI, Candy.ai and Chai AI all list voice, image generation and video generation. Character.AI lists voice and image generation. AI Girlfriend lists image generation, and Baratnoim.hu lists both voice and image generation. Ask which medium you would actually open, since each one often carries its own plan limits.
Treat the plan wording as part of the feature
A memory claim that names a plan is a price question in disguise. Backyard AI attaches its memory to a named plan and AI Angels attaches its memory to a free tier, so on both you should check what the limit resets and what happens when you move between plans.
Media lines carry the same warning. A brand listing voice, image generation and video generation has three features that may sit on different tiers, so the useful comparison is a monthly figure that includes the media you use, not the cheapest one on the page. The Baibu review is a good pattern for this, since a short feature list is easier to price than a long one.
What the memory lines do not settle
Each memory line says what is remembered. None of them says who can read a stored conversation, how long a transcript is kept after you close the app, or what a deletion request covers. Treat those lines as questions for a service rather than as a privacy answer, and ask all three before you pay.
Billing follows the same shape. Ask whether a purchase unlocks memory permanently, whether a renewal keeps the stored history, and whether canceling removes it. For a starting shortlist, the AI companion apps ranking and the AI girlfriend apps ranking put prices and feature lists next to each other.
Put the pieces together
Start with the memory line, then the media line, then the plan wording, and only then the price. That order keeps lean options visible and stops a headline fee from hiding a feature you would use every day.
Read the detail pages for the two or three that survive that filter: the AI Angels review for a memory claim on a free tier, AIGirlfriends.ai for long recall, AIAllure for a broad feature set, and Backyard AI for plan based memory. The AI boyfriend apps ranking covers the same checks for a different set of brands.