>>3086322NovelAI the goat as always.
I haven't been sperging about Character Reference since I've been very busy with work, but it's really good and compensates for one of the main advantages local had (LORAs).
Main disadvantages of NovelAI:
1. $25/month price tag for the highest tier.
2. Backgrounds are bad. There's ways to compensate but they can only go so far, and don't expect good backgrounds by default unless it's nature or something very simple.
3. Not good at realism. People have created setups for pseudorealistic styles but you have to go pretty far out of your way.
4. Not good at most things that aren't illustrated depictions of characters in general actually. It's very good at what it does but what it does is limited in scope compared to more "all purpose" options or options that can utilize LORAs for flexibility. No video either and there probably never will be.
If the drawbacks don't concern you then I can't recommend it highly enough. It's extremely private and censorship-free so you can generate whatever the hell you want (yes, even that) as long as the model can comprehend it, it's very easy to learn and use out of the box, it's online so you can use it with mobile and potato PC's, it recognizes a ton of characters and concepts even without the use of character reference, and it's always improving and adding new features. (Style reference is on the way which, if character reference is any indication, should be very good, but might be incompatible with other features. They've also strongly hinted a Nano Banana-like suite of editing tools is coming; that's probably ~6 or so months off but I have very high hopes for it.)
tl;dr a bit pricey and doesn't do much besides draw characters but does that extremely well
