Product / UX / UI & API

SillyTavern

Self-hosted chat frontend originally forked from TavernAI, focused on character/roleplay use cases with deep support for prompt engineering, lorebooks, group chats, and any OpenAI-compatible or local backend. Dominant frontend in the open roleplay/character-chat community (~28k GitHub stars) and the de facto UI for users moving off Character.ai to local models.

SillyTavern v1.18.0 (released 3 May 2026). Self-hosted local chat front-end (NodeJS) for text-gen LLMs, originally a TavernAI fork (Feb 2023); connects to many backends (KoboldAI, OpenAI, Claude, Mistral, etc.) with character/roleplay focus, image-gen + TTS integration, extensions. Verified live on GitHub June 2026.

Openness

5 high confidence

5.0

license: AGPL-3.0(OSI, copyleft)
source: public(github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern)
self-host: only(local install)
extensions: third-party
core-gated: ungated

AGPL-3.0 (OSI-approved copyleft), full source public, self-host only, fully open. No proprietary/SaaS tier.

https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern recorded 2026-06-04
AGPL-3.0; public source; v1.18.0 (3 May 2026); local UI for LLM/image/TTS backends

Adoption

3 low confidence

3.0

No published download/install or active-user counts found (self-hosted desktop app, no telemetry). Falling back to 28.9k GitHub stars + 300+ contributors as the only honest signal, capped at level 3 per the stars-fallback rule. Likely a large enthusiast/roleplay community but unverified.

https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern recorded 2026-06-04
28.9k stars, 300+ contributors; no install/usage count published

Capability

3 medium confidence

3.0

Feature-rich for its niche, broad backend coverage, image-gen/TTS, extensions, character/roleplay tooling (Visual Novel mode). Specialized toward roleplay rather than general-purpose assistant work; mid-tier on the general chat-UI matrix.

https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern recorded 2026-06-04
multi-backend, image-gen, TTS, extensions, Visual Novel mode

Unchanged since 2026-07-30 (last edited, not re-checked)