We investigate entropic force cosmological models with the possibility of matter creation and energy exchange between the bulk and the horizon of a homogeneous and isotropic flat Universe. We consider three different kinds of entropy, Bekenstein’s, the non-extensive Tsallis–Cirto’s, and the quartic entropy, plus some phenomenological functional forms for matter creation rate to model different entropic force models and put the observational constraints on them. We show that while most of them are indistinguishable from a standard $$\Lambda $$
Λ
CDM scenario, the Bekenstein entropic force model with a matter creation rate proportional to the Hubble parameter is statistically highly favored over $$\Lambda $$
Λ
CDM. As a general result, we also find that both the Hawking temperature parameter $$\gamma $$
γ
, which relates the energy exchange between the bulk and the boundary of the Universe, and the matter creation rate $$\Gamma (t)$$
Γ
(
t
)
, must be very small to reproduce observational data.