Offbrand Toyhouses

Many of these sites have their pros and cons, whether it’s the setup, paywalls, customization, etc. As of a whole, toyhouse has seemed to me like the best of them all, and I also have a large amount of characters here that would be a pain to transfer elsewhere. I’m familiar with toyhouse, after having used it for a while, and it has many useful features that I enjoy. 

For you guys, I suggest using these alternate websites if you are ever anxious about this place shutting down, or if you worry about getting banned/your account being forcefully closed. I don’t think toyhouse will shut down anytime soon, but I understand the admin is very swamped with stuff irl and if something were to happen to her (like a car crash or sudden illness) there’s a chance the site may go permanently offline. These sites can be sort of backup plans so you don’t lose anything on this site. 

[Question] Question for people who are actively using CharacterHub: Is the site still pro-AI art or did it switch to anti-AI or neutral? Based on recent discussions I felt like it would be potentially important to know for many people.—Cosmind
[Answer] characterhub has no stance on whether it's supportive or neutral about ai, but it's allowed—Arlatius

Tip! I think if you fill out the oc part and it's informative of your interest in the oc that also bumps you higher—pinkieglitterheart

I've been using CharacterHub for a while, and right now I would say it's not worth using in its current state. The only thing I like about it is that you don't have to code your own profile (it offers lots of different customizable templates for you) but that's really it.

Here's one of my character's profiles so you can get a feel for the layout. It's very mobile friendly, which results in a LOT of scrolling to get through different pages (the user profiles are particularly egregious as characters are displayed vertically rather than horizontally like Toyhouse). You can't change the thumbnail image for pictures, resulting in lots of awkward cropping. You also can't rearrange the images; if you want to move an image, you have to delete and re-upload it. Very frustrating.

The rest of the site feels unpolished, and the Discord really gives no indication that anything is getting worked on or improved other than bug fixes. There is a suggestion channel on the Discord but no roadmap. The marketplace is also really, really bad. There's no way to filter out certain listings, you're just forced to scroll through YCHs, adopts, and commissions all lumped together. There's currently no on-site messaging system, so the mod (and it really feels like there's just one) will e-mail you directly if someone replies to your listing. All questionnaires and art games (think like, the 10-minute doodle thread) are handled through Google forms as well which... why can't you just host this on the site? 

Also, about the home page, there's no way to customize it. On your home page is a marketplace tab, trending characters, worlds and posts from people you don't follow, and near the end is newly published characters. So even MORE needless scrolling.

Characterhub was supposed to be more focused on organic, genuine user to user engagement, but so far falls pretty short. Especially because you can pay real money to feature your character. It depends on how you feel about stuff like that, but that just doesn't sit right with me. 

TL;DR: As a character storage site it's fine, but the wait isn't at all worth it. For now you should just stick to Toyhouse. If anyone has any questions about the site, feel free to ping me.—HAii2u

I had a place on the list a while ago and recently found out that I had an invite link to make an account from months ago, so it was a strange find, but I made an account, and does seem promising, I just don't think I'm getting enough engagement yet haha

I'm not sure if it's just my device but Characterhub can be pretty glitchy on mobile, like when adding an avatar and banner for the character (at some point the "choose photo" button doesn't even pop up until AFTER I upload a character)—SpoiledRottenMuffin

I tried to join characterhub two months ago but the waitlist doesn't move. Also, the way they act on social media turns me off.—VainiChocolate

Honestly knowing characterhub doesn’t have an official stance on ai and allows it is really setting me off, not to mention the way they act on social media. I saw their Instagram and it was a bunch of ads for it leaning almost borderline misleading and not mentioning its waitlist only/explaining the acceptance process to downright kinda mocking the people not already on the website. Really turns me away from actually wanting to use it knowing the owners are acting like it’s some sort of secret club or cool kid clique.

Not to mention the whole “oc trauma generator” they put into one of their ads too, that was… borderline unsavoury, acting like that topic is just some funny thing to drum up engagement—@AUBR3Y

Also was just shown these screenshots from the site, I don’t even have to explain why this gives me bad vibes lol.

—@AUBR3Y

I'm not sure if this was mentioned in the thread already, but I think people who are interested in CharacterHub should know that originally they advertised their website (about a year ago) by making blank bot accounts on tumblr that would mass-message random people a link to apply to the website, which is the exact same behavior of scam bots that send people to scam websites, and it made people (alongside me) think it was a scam. I think there was a toyhouse thread about the tumblr messages, but I can't find them atm.

I wanna clarify I don't think that its a scam, but it's had a history of very sketchy advertising techniques in my opinion (who would want to advertise their website by using spam bots?) which makes me not want to use it and advise people to be cautious if they want to use the platform. 

Here's a reddit thread of people talking about this, and screenshots of it 

[Screenshots are attached to the actual comment, found on page four of this thread]

They advertised their platform on toyhouse by making an "ai art" bot mass message people for "free art", and someone made a thread asking about it. It seems to be gone now, but the artbot profile used to have a link advertising characterhub on it.—tatzlyip

After Refsheet, I switched to Characterhub. I'm quite happy with the site. Not the biggest fan of the Discord servers, because there's a lot of minors around and it sometimes feels like I have to tiptoe around minors - and some of the rules are weird. Like, we can't show shirtless men OC without spoilering it. I don't get it. The server only allows PG-13 content, which - for me - is a tad difficult task because I am not from America and I don't know what counts as PG-13 and what not. Hell, even in MY country the rating-line is incredibly blurry.—Schokobroetchen

The staff respond quickly and are attentive at least when I used it. I had certain questions that were answered in mere hours. The site is a bit buggy and slow when I used it and it has a very corporate feel to it. I peaked into the Discord and saw a lot of shipping drama full of kids so I dipped from that but generally for OC storage it seems alright. Allows NSFW tagged and I believe now allows watermarking but used to be a bit of a pain because I had to watermark everything myself before uploading. I like the music profile bit where you can link a spotify playlist to a character's playlist. Allows me to mark my profile NSFW which means minors can't see or interact, I'm assuming. The discord was full of children though so make that what you will but if you're marked as an adult and NSFW account it should be fine. Also cannot figure out how to unlist things you put up on store but no longer want to sell. I have ordered something on site before that just kinda never got acknowledged, no money was exchanged so no idea really about the shop system it seemed really buggy some months ago though. I find a lot of the advertising very corny and off-putting often... you know, like a corporate "you like memes? you like trauma? we're trendy with the kids!" kind of thing.

Something else about CharacterHub I just remembered that was rather weird was my friend did put in an application but they sorta... rushed through their app and it didn't make any sense. They ended up misgendering the character submitted weirdly in their email reply and spoke about them [as in, my friend, the artist] in third person rather than about the character itself..? 

So uh instead of being like "Oh your character sound SUPER COOL I really like its wings" or something they instead wrote "[Artist's name] sounds really cool I love what HE [misgendering bc my friend, goes by they/them and the character did as well lol] draws and the objectheads and monsters are super cool what a good artstyle!" back in an email to them so it was mega weird for them to receive and they were super confused. To have an email sent to you Talking about you in third person... well...

I also suspect, given it took a few days for them to be approved to join they do take into account your quality and following given my friend had over 1k followers and I know people with less who it took much longer to be approved for. But it was really bizzare. My friend never really complained about it but it does show a lack of actually reading the submissions closely given they didn't just Not talk about the character they for some reason spoke about my friend's art and artist status instead...?—rap

I just got back into actually using it (or rather, uploading characters on it) after being invited months ago. I actually quite like it, if I'm to be honest. I haven't actually seen the advertisements at all, but I can see why people would be offput by them from what I've heard. Being the type of person who don't really interact with others all to often, I also didn't join the discord server either so I can't really tell you what that's like either, but speaking SOLELY on the "character storage" part of it, it's actually really nice. If you absolutely MUST customize a profile via HTML/CSS then you probably wouldn't like it all that much since it is rigid in that area, but if you are more for informational type of profiles, the sort of "boxy" kinda style bios with information organized in boxes, CharacterHub would be right up your alley! There are organizers similar to the "fields" in TH bios, but they can be customized just like how you use fields OR you can use their presets, which, if you are like me, is actually quite helpful because it helps generate ideas I haven't thought up of initially. You get the basic ones like these: 

(Image in the actual comment on page 4)

In regards to customization of the profile structure itself, you can rearrange the info boxes however you'd like, but not much actual customization to the overall format itself (as stated previously.) You can adjust fonts and theme/background colors, and save them as templates if you'd like, but not so much outside of that. If you're curious how that bit looks, here ya go:

(Image in the actual comment on page 4)

If you want to see a sort of example of a character bio, you're welcome to look at one I've filled out: https://characterhub.com/character/amaranth-cessair

Currently, it seems like the "relationships" tab is bugged out, but typically, this is how one looks like! I haven't really bothered to edit the theme template at all because in dark mode makes it look better, and also because when I'm logged on, the side bar pops up and it looks less empty than it actually is, so I'm not bothered by it. Both of these things are only accessible if you have an account, which is kinda lame tbh and one of the down sides.

This is how it looks like for me:

(Image in the actual comment on page 4)

All-in-all, if you are keen on organization and informational bios, while also ignoring discords/don't care about really getting involved with the CharacterHub community like myself: You'll probably really like the site since it's pretty well organized in that respect, honestly.

Bare in mind that if you want to jump the waitlist in invites a bit: you DO have to talk about your character(s) (At least one of them, I talked about two though since they both had lore together) it seems like they DO prioritize people who talk about their characters, I'm assuming because it shows intent of using the website. I joined the waitlist at like 32000 people in line or something like that and got in within like a month or two? I think??? I don't really remember but I know that it was a LOT shorter than I expected. The devs DO review the entries by the way, they addressed the characters I talked about in the email I was given:

[Noah and Ark sound really great together! It'll be interesting to see how Ark protects Noah in his "lesser" form.]

I'm not sure if they are still doing this, but when I got the invite in December last year, they were, anyways. Anyways, I hope this was informational enough? I can (try to) answer questions about how the site is technically, but not really community-wise because I don't really engage with the community as much there. The devs seem pretty involved, at least, so there's that.—Dianxia

Id love to use characterhub to kinda get away from toyhouse but my god their posting ways are so off and annoying. One post was like “oh not a lot of people use the site please join we need more people interested!” The waitlist has 30k people on it and they haven’t moved the list in a while I’ve been waiting since August to get in. They say you can join contests and such but from what I’ve checked there’s like- none. So if you really don’t want to wait for the waitlist for like a year I suggest watching their instagram or TikTok posts till their mascot finally talks about putting it out—Hawaiian_Pizza

A note on Unvale. It doesn't accept NSFW art, unlike the other sites. This can either be a bonus or a downside depending on what you are looking for.—SilvernJack

 I tried this out but the immediate turn off was no NSFW so I may delete my account soon, sorry. The community seems geared towards children mostly. The UI seems smoother and fast but again I get the corporate feel from this website similar to CharacterHub. The no AI and NFT policies on site are probably what draw a lot of people in. Every person I saw on site was under 18 which probably tells you that it's very much geared for children. As someone nearly 30 I do not want to be around children / in communities that give me the impression it's for children, so it doesn't really strike me as something I'd use. I think it has promise but again the big indication that isn't really for adults is very much preventing me recommending this to anyone in my age range.—rap

Response from brilovely
we don't allow NSFW content, and we have a good amount of teenagers on the site. for some, this is a positive thing. for others, it's not something they're interested in. we don't have any plans to change our NSFW policies, so it's likely we're just not the best fit. i appreciate you checking the site out regardless! it means a lot to me and our team.

Just made an unvale account out of curiosity, I'm not impressed by the fact there's a text limit of 2000 characters for character profiles so I can't share my main 3 OCs' complete bio/profile info over there. This isn't a good option if you like to write long, or in depth profiles for your characters right now.

Custom image ordering seems to be glitchy too, it likes to jumble some of your character's images around after saving changes to their profile instead of keeping them in the order you set them in and takes multiple attempts of reordering and saving until it finally gets it right.—Polar-Tang

Response from brilovely
you are correct that the OC pages have a 2,000 character limit right now. if you come back... in probably, like, a week, we are having a big feature release that i think will solve your concerns! we release stuff every few weeks based on feedback from the community. more room for written content is something that's been asked about a lot, so that's what we've been working on! Edit: and just to clarify-- we're doing way more than upping the character limit! it'll soon allow for all sorts of stories, fact sheets, RP logs, D&D session recaps, and more. whatever written content you want associated with your OC. lots of room!

I just checked out UnVale and I'm really disappointed in the fact you can only write a 2000 word description of a character. I wanted to just copy and paste what I have written on their ToyHouse profiles but I can't do that. I guess I could just use the writing thing for it but it's such a hassle

Edit: Also the fact you have to edit a character's profile to add images is a lil annoying, that's going to take some getting used to.

Edit: Another complaint. You can only change the colour of your character's profile between like 6 different colours, you cannot even choose your own hex code for it, and I honestly don't like any of the options provided because they're all really flashy.  

Edit: Ok, I have a lot of complaints. So, unlike ToyHouse, I can't seem to find a way to connect a written piece to 2 characters, and I cannot find a way to connect an image to 2 different characters. So if you have any writing/drawings that contain more than one character you're going to have to upload it twice, or however many times for as many characters it has, which is extremely inconvenient. Additionally, there is no "art tab", making it difficult to find examples of an individual's art, as the only way to find it would be looking through their characters which may be muddled in with a ton of art from others as well. 

One last complaint, but as you can tell I just have a lot. On the mobile version, in order to add an image to a character you have to scroll through all their images, but if you accidentally swipe on any images it will rearrange them. This is incredibly annoying, as it's super easy to accidentally rearrange the images just by scrolling through them. A simple workaround to avoid this could have been just adding a "rearrange mode" option that would toggle between allowing you to drag the images, and otherwise they would remain still. Edit: Oh wait, like that other user said, the order you rearrange the images to resets when you refresh the page anyway, so I guess that doesn't even matter lol. Still sucks though, and it doesn't even seem to be organising them based off of titles or time uploaded either, it's just random but you can't change it from that 

Edit: It's also extremely buggy in that certain images seem to be disappearing from my gallery, but then after I reupload them the original image shows up and then there's 2 images now. But this keeps happening. The previously mentioned image ordering bug is also pretty dire considering that whatever the first 3 images in the gallery are are what gets displayed before someone clicks on your OC, so if your character has gone through significant design changes since their first drawing and UnVale randomly decides to make that the image that gets displayed against your will, it would appear rather misleading. No way I could change this btw. Even just adding simple image tabs like ToyHouse has could evade this issue. 

Edit: One last complaint. There is no way to block others that I can find. Which sucks because there are some users I'm seeing popping up on there who I have blocked on here and would like to not accidentally interact with anything they post. This is honestly a safety concern for any site. 

And also, I do like the "random characters" function because at first I thought it was actually random unlike ToyHouse's one which is known to sometimes have a ton of characters from the same user. But, I literally got like 4 characters from the same (very popular) user after shuffling it which makes me think it does favour some users and isn't actually random—SherbetToons

The only downside would be that it can be somewhat slow if you're uploading multiple characters and images too fast, images can be stuck while uploading so you have to refresh the page, you can't really do much to change the layout of the profiles, and there isn't much of a community around it (I've uploaded around 150~ characters on there and still no notifications) and most people won't really pay attention to you. I'd recommend it if you're just looking for more of a character storage than a community, because that's what I'm using it for rn—SpoiledRottenMuffin

Refsheet development appears to be either very slow or completely halted. The site is very buggy and slow right now. The forums appear to be broken at this moment, but before it was filled with spam posts. You can't see or manage who is following you. 

I look forward to its potential when/if development picks up, but right now it borders on unusable for me.—SilvernJack

Tbh Im using refsheet lately and I like it a lot more than any other place. The flexibility of toyhouse overwhelms me so Im glad there's another site with a premade sheet. Also you don't need an invitation. And yes, it doesn't really have a community but at this point that's just another advantage—VainiChocolate

Personally I can't recommend Refsheet. I was a Patreon of that site for a year or so, and updates seem to have halted. We patrons got V2-profiles, but well, they aren't anything special. if you use one, you can't even see your OCs avatar!—Schokobroetchen

I found this glitch heaven. I had to re-do colours on profiles constantly and everything felt super clunky to use. The forums are near dead but it's not unusable if you have patience with it. Not much social interactions on here at all though. Despite the glitches I got used to eventually messing with the clunky system enough to make a few profiles though they're very bare bones and you usually have to add some nice formatting to get something visually appealing.—rap

It has its limits (Only 20 characters and limited profile information) but the art system is really well managed.—AstroWildcat

Very quiet generally but the discord was nice when I was there and I was able to talk to the owner a few times about what kind of content is allowed on site, etc. to get an idea. Pretty much allows all NSFW in nature so long as not underage characters but everything else is fair game including things that are more "problematic" in nature so depending on how you feel about that will make a difference (NSFW content incorporates a lot of things so it was important to clarify what is/isn't abided). Mostly seems to be for furries and from my time in discord mostly everyone was an adult. Found it really easy to use and simplistic with not much issues with the UI. Userbase is mostly chill adults and I really like OCBin given how quiet and peaceful it is. I did not have any issues with this site. I wish profiles had more template options though to use. Also only 20 slots for characters is a bit thumbs down.—rap

I also thought of notebook.ai. I think it's decent for people that also like to worldbuild. Character and location pages are free and unlimited to everyone though you need a membership to access all the other page types. Occasionally there are events that allow anyone to make an unlimited amount of a certain page type and you can access all of your pages even if your membership runs out. The pages consist of prompts for you to fill out and a gallery to upload images. You can customise the page layout and categories. I don't like the community there for the most part though it might have changed in the time since I left. They're a bit toxic and obsessed with the 'OG' people who have been around since the start. That's my experience as an 'OG' lmao. It's a very small community but there are some useful boards there for characters, stories, and worldbuilding related stuff. Generally, it's not a site for storing your characters like Toyhouse but for developing them, your stories, and your settings. I only recommend it to the people who are interested in those things. The developer, from what I remember, is pretty involved and can easily be contacted through the forums which is nice. Again, it's been a long time since I've touched the forums.

Here's an example of what the character pages look like though keep in mind that the default ones have different sections as I've customised mine: https://www.notebook.ai/plan/characters/663496—Reblod 

Although the site focuses on selling art related things, you can be a regular user that can upload art and link it to an OC.
Personally it feels like a very old version of Deviantart too, you can write journals and post art normally as well, and you can even hide your art and ocs.

This would be an alternative for those who use Toyhouse for selling adopts, commission and anything of the sort

It's a general old school style art community and gallery site, but it also has a built in character profile feature so you can upload and store your character's refs and info.