NovelAI vs Novelcrafter

NovelAI

• Fiction writers who want an AI that continues their own prose
• Interactive fiction and text adventures with persistent lore
• People who want story writing and anime-style image generation in one subscription

Novelcrafter

• Novelists and series writers who want a story bible tied to the manuscript
• Writers who want to pick and pay for their own AI models
• Co-authors and writing groups, on the Specialist plan

NovelAI

• There is no free plan: the Paper trial's generations are granted once and do not refill.
• Subscriptions renew every 30 days, and the subscription docs list no annual option.
• There are no native apps; it runs in a browser or as an installable progressive web app.
• Forgetting the account email or password means losing access to stories stored on the server, because of the local encryption.

Novelcrafter

• There is no free plan. Without an active subscription, data stays viewable and exportable but cannot be added to or edited.
• AI starts at the Hobbyist plan and is bring-your-own-key, so model usage is paid separately to the AI provider unless local models are used.
• Workshop Chat needs Artisan, and inviting collaborators or creating teams needs Specialist. Each user needs a subscription of their own.
• It runs in the browser with nothing to install, and is described as mobile compatible; no desktop or mobile app is listed.

NovelAI

Story editor

Write in the editor and send to have the AI continue the text. Every generation and edit is kept in a branching history, and a retry produces a new output.

Lorebook

Entries for characters, locations and factions are inserted into the AI's context when their activation keys appear in the story. Lorebooks can be imported and exported.

Text Adventure mode

Actions typed with a > symbol tell the AI what a character does, and it writes the narrative response. Pre-made scenarios are available to start from.

Text to speech

Streamed voices read inputs and AI outputs aloud for subscribers. A local option uses the browser's own speech synthesis instead.

Image generation

NovelAI Diffusion models produce anime-style images from prompts and tags, with inpainting, a canvas and Director Tools for edits. Images are paid for in Anlas.

Encrypted story storage

Stories saved to NovelAI's servers are encrypted in the browser first. Text sent for a generation is transmitted unencrypted over HTTPS and, per the FAQ, not stored or logged.

Novelcrafter

The Codex

A wiki for characters, locations and lore with aliases, relations, tags and progressions over time. It finds mentions across scenes and can be shared by every book in a series.

Planning views

The Grid reorders acts, chapters and scenes by drag and drop, the Matrix shows the whole story as a spreadsheet-like table, and the Outline is a single-page summary.

Manuscript editor

A rich text editor with focus mode, highlighter markers, sections for alternative ideas, revision history, and import from Word, Markdown or HTML files.

Bring-your-own-key AI

From Hobbyist up, connects to services such as OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenRouter or to local models through LM Studio and Ollama, with custom prompts and a prompt preview.

Workshop Chat

On Artisan and above, a chat for feedback and brainstorming that can take the outline, a scene or the full novel as context and extract scene beats or Codex entries from the reply.

Collaboration and teams

Any account can be invited as a viewer, and editing needs a paid plan. Inviting others to a novel or series, and creating teams, needs the Specialist plan.

NovelAI

• Tablet$10

  per month (renews every 30 days)

  Unlimited text and text-to-speech generation, plus 1,000 Anlas a month to spend on image generation.

• Scroll$15

  per month (renews every 30 days)

  Everything in Tablet with a larger context size, so the AI takes more of the story into account.

• Opus$25

  per month (renews every 30 days)

  Largest context (28,672 tokens), the Xialong model, 10,000 Anlas a month and Anlas-free standard images within a usage limit.

Novelcrafter

• Scribe$4

  per month, or $40 billed annually

  Unlimited books, the Codex, series and basic review tools. No AI features.

• Hobbyist$8

  per month, or $80 billed annually

  Adds AI with your own API key or local models: scene summarization, character extraction and generating prose from scene beats, plus live chat support.

• Artisan$14

  per month, or $140 billed annually

  Adds Workshop Chat for feedback and brainstorming on scenes. Advanced review tools are listed for this tier but marked as planned.

• Specialist$20

  per month, or $200 billed annually

  Adds inviting other users to novels and series, creating and managing teams, and priority support.

NovelAI

No public discounts listed.

Novelcrafter

• Annual discount

  2 months off with annual billing

  Annual billing costs ten times the monthly price: $40 for Scribe, $80 for Hobbyist, $140 for Artisan and $200 for Specialist, against $4, $8, $14 and $20 a month.