Model rankings updated May 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.

Hy3 preview is a high-efficiency Mixture-of-Experts model from Tencent designed for agentic workflows and production use. It supports configurable reasoning levels across disabled, low, and high modes, allowing it to balance speed and depth depending on the task, while delivering strong code generation and reliable performance across multi-step, real-world workflows.

Kimi K2.6 is Moonshot AI's next-generation multimodal model, designed for long-horizon coding, coding-driven UI/UX generation, and multi-agent orchestration. It handles complex end-to-end coding tasks across Python, Rust, and Go, and can convert prompts and visual inputs into production-ready interfaces. Its agent swarm architecture scales to hundreds of parallel sub-agents for autonomous task decomposition - delivering documents, websites, and spreadsheets in a single run without human oversight.
Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model yet, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It excels at iterative development, complex codebase navigation, end-to-end project management with memory, polished document creation, and confident computer use for web QA and workflow automation.

DeepSeek-V3.2 is a large language model designed to harmonize high computational efficiency with strong reasoning and agentic tool-use performance. It introduces DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), a fine-grained sparse attention mechanism that reduces training and inference cost while preserving quality in long-context scenarios. A scalable reinforcement learning post-training framework further improves reasoning, with reported performance in the GPT-5 class, and the model has demonstrated gold-medal results on the 2025 IMO and IOI. V3.2 also uses a large-scale agentic task synthesis pipeline to better integrate reasoning into tool-use settings, boosting compliance and generalization in interactive environments.
Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs
Gemini 3 Flash Preview is a high speed, high value thinking model designed for agentic workflows, multi turn chat, and coding assistance. It delivers near Pro level reasoning and tool use performance with substantially lower latency than larger Gemini variants, making it well suited for interactive development, long running agent loops, and collaborative coding tasks. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash, it provides broad quality improvements across reasoning, multimodal understanding, and reliability.
The model supports a 1M token context window and multimodal inputs including text, images, audio, video, and PDFs, with text output. It includes configurable reasoning via thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, high), structured output, tool use, and automatic context caching. Gemini 3 Flash Preview is optimized for users who want strong reasoning and agentic behavior without the cost or latency of full scale frontier models.
Opus 4.7 is the next generation of Anthropic's Opus family, built for long-running, asynchronous agents. Building on the coding and agentic strengths of Opus 4.6, it delivers stronger performance on complex, multi-step tasks and more reliable agentic execution across extended workflows. It is especially effective for asynchronous agent pipelines where tasks unfold over time - large codebases, multi-stage debugging, and end-to-end project orchestration.
Beyond coding, Opus 4.7 brings improved knowledge work capabilities - from drafting documents and building presentations to analyzing data. It maintains coherence across very long outputs and extended sessions, making it a strong default for tasks that require persistence, judgment, and follow-through.
For users upgrading from earlier Opus versions, see our official migration guide here
Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's most capable open-source foundation model. Built on a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it selectively activates only 11B of its 196B parameters per token. It is a reasoning model that is incredibly speed efficient even at long contexts.
MiniMax-M2.7 is a next-generation large language model designed for autonomous, real-world productivity and continuous improvement. Built to actively participate in its own evolution, M2.7 integrates advanced agentic capabilities through multi-agent collaboration, enabling it to plan, execute, and refine complex tasks across dynamic environments.
Trained for production-grade performance, M2.7 handles workflows such as live debugging, root cause analysis, financial modeling, and full document generation across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It delivers strong results on benchmarks including 56.2% on SWE-Pro and 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2, while achieving a 1495 ELO on GDPval-AA, setting a new standard for multi-agent systems operating in real-world digital workflows.
Grok 4.1 Fast is xAI's best agentic tool calling model that shines in real-world use cases like customer support and deep research. 2M context window.
Reasoning can be enabled/disabled using the reasoning enabled parameter in the API. Learn more in our docs

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.