Model rankings updated July 2026 based on real usage data.
Discover the top AI models for roleplay (RP), character chat and creative writing, ranked by real usage data on OpenRouter. These LLMs excel at maintaining consistent personas, rich dialogue and immersive storytelling across long-context sessions.
Whether you're using Janitor AI, SillyTavern or another frontend, or building your own character chatbot or interactive fiction engine, OpenRouter gives you access to the best roleplay models through a single API.
Based on top weekly usage data from millions of users accessing AI models for roleplay through OpenRouter.
MiMo-V2.5 is a native omnimodal model by Xiaomi. It delivers Pro-level agentic performance at roughly half the inference cost, while surpassing MiMo-V2-Omni in multimodal perception across image and video understanding tasks. Its 1M context window supports complete documents, extended conversations, and complex task contexts in a single pass, making it ideal for integration with agent frameworks where strong reasoning, rich perception, and cost efficiency all matter.

DeepSeek V4 Flash is an efficiency-optimized Mixture-of-Experts model from DeepSeek with 284B total parameters and 13B activated parameters, supporting a 1M-token context window. It is designed for fast inference and high-throughput workloads, while maintaining strong reasoning and coding performance.
The model includes hybrid attention for efficient long-context processing. Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is well suited for applications such as coding assistants, chat systems, and agent workflows where responsiveness and cost efficiency are important.

Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model from Tencent (21B active, 192 experts with top-8 routing) built for reasoning, agentic workflows, and real-world production use. It supports a configurable reasoning effort: a direct no-think mode by default, plus low and high chain-of-thought modes for complex math, coding, and multi-step problems. With a 256K context window, Hy3 targets long-horizon tasks, including improved coreference resolution, multi-turn constraint tracking, and stable tool-calling that generalizes across agent scaffoldings.
Tencent positions it as a reliable, cost-effective option across coding, document processing, financial analysis, game development, and frontend design, with a strong emphasis on grounded, anti-hallucination behavior that answers when grounded and flags when evidence is missing rather than fabricating.

DeepSeek V4 Pro is a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts model from DeepSeek with 1.6T total parameters and 49B activated parameters, supporting a 1M-token context window. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agent workflows, with strong performance across knowledge, math, and software engineering benchmarks.
Built on the same architecture as DeepSeek V4 Flash, it introduces a hybrid attention system for efficient long-context processing. Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is well suited for complex workloads such as full-codebase analysis, multi-step automation, and large-scale information synthesis, where both capability and efficiency are critical.
GLM 5.2 is a large-scale reasoning model from Z.ai. It supports text input and output with a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agent workflows, project-level software engineering, and complex multi-step automation.
Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is particularly strong at coding and tool use across long-running tasks, able to maintain engineering context and follow standards consistently through a full development workflow, from requirements to multi-platform deployment, in a single task.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is an open frontier-reasoning and orchestration model from NVIDIA, with 55B active parameters out of 550B total (MoE). Built on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts architecture, it supports text input and output with a context window of up to 1M tokens. It is suited for long-running agentic workflows, including agent orchestration, coding agents, deep research, and complex enterprise tasks.
It is particularly strong at multi-step reasoning and planning, with high-throughput inference designed for high-volume agent pipelines. It is part of the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models for agentic AI.
MiniMax-M3 is a multimodal foundation model from MiniMax. It supports text, image, and video inputs with text output, a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agentic work, coding, and tool use. It is built on MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), which replaces full attention with KV-block selection to cut per-token compute at long context — roughly 1/20 the cost of the previous generation at 1M tokens, with substantially faster prefill and decode while retaining quality across most tasks.
Trained as a native multimodal model on interleaved data and tuned for multi-turn, production-like collaboration via an interactive user-simulator framework, the model is oriented toward sustained, multi-step tasks rather than single-turn execution.
Step 3.7 Flash is StepFun's latest high-efficiency multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model. It pairs a 196B-parameter language backbone with a vision encoder for native image and video understanding, activating roughly 11B parameters per token. The model supports a 256K context window and exposes selectable reasoning levels (high/medium/low), letting callers trade off speed, cost, and depth of reasoning.
Designed for coding, agentic workflows, structured outputs, and long-context productivity tasks.
Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic's most capable generally available model in the Opus family. It supports text, image, and file inputs with text output, with reasoning support and a 1M-token context window. It is suited for highly autonomous agents, long-horizon agentic work, knowledge work, and memory-driven tasks where coherence over extended sessions matters.
It is particularly strong on multi-step reasoning, complex coding, and end-to-end project orchestration - large codebases, multi-stage debugging, and long-running asynchronous agent pipelines. Beyond coding, it handles knowledge work such as drafting documents, building presentations, and analyzing data, maintaining quality across very long outputs.

Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Moonshot AI. It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at navigating large repositories, using tools, debugging, and iterating against images, logs, tests, and runtime feedback. Its architecture uses KDA and Attention Residuals for computational efficiency.