Candy AI and Nomi AI are both AI companion apps, but they’re built around opposite bets. Candy AI, operated by Malta-registered EverAI, bets that you want multimedia — on-demand images, short AI video, voice — and structures its whole economy around a token store. Nomi bets that what actually keeps people subscribed is a companion that remembers last month’s conversation, and charges a simpler subscription with credits for extras. That makes this a genuinely useful head-to-head: you’re not choosing between two similar apps, you’re choosing which of two philosophies you’re paying for.

Feature set: breadth vs depth

Candy AI is the broader product on paper. Its homepage, checked live for this comparison, advertises four interaction modes — chat, voice, AI-generated images, and AI video where characters “move, react, and engage with you in real time” — plus 100+ pre-built characters and a deep custom builder. If your mental model of an AI girlfriend includes photos on request, Candy AI and apps like DreamGF are the category built for that.

Nomi’s feature list is shorter and pointed in a different direction: a layered memory system (short, medium, and long-term retention), voice calls, group chats with up to three Nomis, and selfies/AI art as a secondary feature on credits. The company’s pitch is “emotional intelligence,” and unusually for this category, third-party data backs some of it up — a 4.6/5 Apple App Store rating from roughly 2,600 ratings when we verified the listing for our Nomi AI review, with reviewers specifically praising memory.

Pricing reality: one of these has a sticker price

Nomi is the easy one to quote. Its pricing, cross-checked against its own pricing page during our research, is $15.99/month, $39.99/quarter, or $99.99/year — about $8.33/month annualized — with a genuine no-card-required free tier. Credit top-ups for extra selfies, art, video, or additional companions run $4.99 to $99.99, but text chat and memory, the core product, don’t draw them down.

Candy AI has no comparable number. Its homepage, as of this writing, still shows a “-70%” promotional banner with no fixed price attached, and third-party trackers report base subscriptions anywhere from roughly $4 to $17 a month. More importantly, the subscription is only the entry fee: images, video, and voice all consume tokens sold in packs from $9.99 to $299.99, and independent estimates put realistic monthly spend for a media-heavy user at $25–$80+. Refund posture differs too — Candy AI allows refunds only within 24 hours and only if you’ve used 20 tokens or fewer; Nomi’s policy is a flat no-refunds, which matches a recurring Trustpilot complaint about unanswered refund requests. Neither is generous; Candy’s window at least exists.

Memory and conversation quality

This is Nomi’s category to lose. Its three-layer memory architecture is the product, and the aggregate App Store sentiment specifically credits continuity and conversational depth. Candy AI’s most consistent complaint across independent reviews is the opposite: companions reportedly losing track of context after roughly half an hour, which directly undercuts the “she remembers everything” marketing. If long-run continuity is what you’re buying, Nomi — or Kindroid, compared directly in Kindroid vs Nomi AI — is the right shelf.

Privacy: candid disclosure vs indefinite retention

Both policies deserve a read, for different reasons — we re-verified both live for this comparison.

Candy AI’s policy is unusually explicit: conversations “may be aggregated, anonymized, and/or de-identified” to train its AI models, and message content may be shared with “third-party LLM providers and/or hosters.” Account data is retained up to three years after last activity. That candor is better than silence, but it confirms your chats are training material passing through third-party hands.

Nomi’s gap is retention. Deleting your account removes personal information within about 28 days — except data already in “training or communications archives,” which is kept in a form “no longer attributable to you” rather than deleted, indefinitely and with no described opt-out. One change since our original review: the age-verification language (“intends to implement additional measures”) no longer appears in the current policy, which now states only that no one under 18 should use the site — self-declaration, in other words. Both apps are covered in more depth in our AI companion privacy guide.

Verdict: which one for whom

Pick Candy AI if multimedia is the point — images, video, and voice in one account is a feature set Nomi doesn’t try to match — but go in budgeting for tokens, not the banner price, and knowing your chats feed third-party LLMs. Pick Nomi AI if conversation and continuity are the point: it’s cheaper, its price is real, and its memory is independently well-reviewed — accepting that anonymized chat data outlives your account and refunds don’t exist. Our scores reflect that split: Nomi 6.7 overall against Candy’s 5.7, mostly on pricing honesty and memory. For the full field, see our Best AI Girlfriend / Companion Apps ranking.