7 Best Midjourney Alternatives: Free and Paid AI Image Tools

Why Use a Midjourney Alternative?

Suppose you use Midjourney to generate an image. As you’ll likely discover, it works remarkably well.

So, if you can consistently get images that you like from Midjourney, why use an alternative image generator? Why not keep using Midjourney?

There are three primary reasons why you should consider an alternative.

• Price: The first and, perhaps, most obvious reason is price. If you use Midjourney often, you’ll want your own AI image generator. Imagine being free to generate hundreds of images for just the cost of your home electricity and internet. It’s possible with an alternative!

• Style: While Midjourney is incredible, it’s not perfect. You might want some images you can’t get with this tool, no matter what Midjourney prompts you try. For example, an alternative could potentially produce a better landscape image.

• Features: Other platforms have some features that Midjourney doesn’t. For example, some alternatives have an API you can call to generate an AI image automatically. That might be useful for your application.

Midjourney is a truly impressive offering. However, that doesn’t mean it has everything you need, and that you shouldn’t explore alternatives to see if another one better suits your artistic needs.

What Are the Best Midjourney Alternatives in 2024?

There’s fast becoming a vast range of AI image generators available, most of which are different interpretations of Stable Diffusion (more on that later).

Here’s a quick comparison of the top 5 options for those stuck for time:

Comparing the Top Midjourney Alternatives

	Midjourney	Leonardo	Adobe Firefly	Dall E 3	Stable Diffusion
Price (Cheapest Paid Plan)	$10/month	$10/month	~$20/month	$20/month ( included with ChatGPT Plus subscription)	Free
Free Generations	None	~10/day	~25/day	None	Unlimited
Paid Generations (Cheapest Plan)	200/month	700/month	1000/month	Unlimited	Unlimited
Speed	Relaxed, Fast, and Turbo generation options	Fast	Fast	Fast	Hardware dependent
Languages	English	English	English	English	English
Supported OS	All	All	All	All	Linux, Windows, MacOS
Mobile Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Private Generations?	Yes on higher pricing tiers	Yes	No	No	Yes
Image-to-Video	Not yet	Yes	Not yet	No	No

1. Leonardo AI

Leonardo AI is a fantastic AI image generator that provides an easy and intuitive way to run Stable Diffusion models. 

One of Leonardo AI’s biggest strengths is its intuitive UI. The designers have made using a very complex set of features remarkably easy.

Leonardo AI also offers numerous styles, including cinematic, retro, creative, and even HDR. You can add “Elements,” like CGI Noir or “Toon & Anime.”

With all these features, you can drill down and hone in on the precise image you want.

Key Features

• Image Generation: With Leonardo AI, there’s a world of possibilities. You can also select any style from multiple resolutions, making it an all-encompassing image tool.

• Easy Interface: The designers behind Leonardo AI produced a straightforward interface that makes creating the image you want remarkably simple.

• Multiple Models: Leonardo has access to hundreds of AI models. This access ensures you can find the model you need to generate your desired image.

• Image Feed: Leonardo’s public image feed inspires. You can see the resulting image from a model and prompt combination, allowing you to learn how to create better images yourself.

• Prompt Generator: Leonardo’s built-in AI prompt generator makes it easy to create a good prompt – even if you don’t have the words to do so immediately.

• Unique Features: Leonardo has a bunch of unique features including video generation, live canvas, image upscaling, inpainting, and more.

Pricing

Leonardo AI offers four pricing tiers:

• Free: Gives about 10 images per day with no concurrent generations and the slowest queues.

• Apprentice: Gives about 700 images a month with concurrency and priority for $10 per month if billed yearly.

• Artisan Unlimited: Gives about 2,000 images a month plus unlimited generations once the fast tokens run out for $24 per month – billed yearly.

• Maestro Unlimited: Provides about 6,000 images a month with all the other features for $48 a month when billed yearly.

2. Adobe Firefly 

Most people know how powerful Adobe Photoshop is.

What most people don’t know is that Adobe has entered the AI space with an impressive image generation tool – Adobe Firefly.

Adobe Firefly has two image models: Firefly Image 3 and Firefly Image 2.

You get a lot of control with Firefly. You can choose from multiple aspect ratios and content styles and even upload images for Firefly to reference when creating your brand-new image.

One of Firefly’s best aspects is that it references concepts in a way that feels natural to photographers.

Instead of putting something like “shot from above” in your text prompt, choose the “shot from above” camera angle.

Each of these options is also a dropdown. Therefore, you can get a quick glimpse of everything that Firefly supports. You can see all the lighting choices, camera angles, and color options.

If you’re a photographer and you want to use an AI generator that feels familiar, Adobe Firefly is likely your best bet.

Key Features

• Familiarity: Adobe Firefly’s options will feel familiar to photographers and people who use Photoshop.

• Least Technical: Programmers have built many solutions on this list for other programmers. Firefly distills complex concepts into easy-to-understand common terminology.

• More Effects: Firefly supports countless effects and styles listed as art generation modes. You can make an image in any style you want.

• Generous Credit Allocation: Free users can generate 25 images per month, but if you’re already a Creative Cloud member, your plan includes 1,000 images per month at no extra cost.

• Realistic: Firefly generates some of the best artwork of any AI image generator, making it one of the more worthy Midjourney alternatives.

• Generative Fill: Adobe Firefly was one of the first AI art generator’s to feature Generative Fill (Inpainting) in their tool.

Pricing

Firefly offers three main pricing tiers:

• Free: 25 images a month for $0.

• Creative Cloud 1-App Membership: Provides 500 images a month plus whatever app you select (e.g., Photoshop or Premiere Pro) for around $20 per month.

• Creative Cloud All Apps Membership: Provides 1,000 images a month plus all the Creative Cloud apps for $59.99 monthly. Students and teachers can reduce this cost to $29.99 per month.

3. Dall-E 3

Dall-E, created by OpenAI (the same company responsible for ChatGPT) is one of the most well-known AI image generators on this list.

Released at the end of 2023, Dall-E 3 is the successor to OpenAI’s compelling Dall-E 2 solution.

Opinions vary on the topic but many consider Dall-E 3 to be Midjourney’s biggest competitor.

Under the hood, Dall-E 3 is a diffusion model. Diffusion models work by starting with a random noise field and slowly creating an image matching your text prompts.

The link between text and pictures comes from a model called CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training).  Simply put, CLIP knows the relationship between the text “red apple” and an image with a red apple.

It feels like sci-fi tech, and it works remarkably well.

Key Features

• Robust: OpenAI secured a $50 billion investment from Microsoft. Dall-E is solid and mature. You can have confidence in its safety if you want to use it in an app you’re building.

• API: If you want to automate image generation, OpenAI lets applications programmatically use this AI image generator service.

• Quality: Dall-E 3 produces some of the best-looking AI generated images.

• Speed: Dall-E 3 is fast, so you won’t have to wait long for new images.

• Integrated with ChatGPT: If you are already a ChatGPT subscriber, you have free access to Dall-E 3. And a quick pro tip – use ChatGPT to help you design the best prompt for Dall-E 3!

Pricing

Dall-E 3 has only one pricing tier:

• Plus: Dall-E 3 is only accessible via the ChatGPT Plus membership which is $20 per month.

Technically, you can call Dall-E 3 via the API and receive a bill per image generated, but since this isn’t comparable to Midjourney, the cost isn’t listed here.

4. Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is one of the most popular AI image-generation options for many reasons.

The biggest reason is simple to understand: Stable Diffusion is open sourced and totally free.

That’s right, free. You don’t need to spend a dime to run it. As long as you have a reasonably decent PC or Mac, you can run Stable Diffusion and get into generating artwork.

Stable Diffusion’s underlying technology is remarkable.

Stable Diffusion works by refining random noise through a series of steps. Eventually, it refines that random noise into an image matching your description.

Setting up Stable Diffusion can be difficult as it needs to run locally on your machine, but there are heaps of tutorials outline showing how to do it.

Key Features

• Price: It’s free!

• Models Are Abundant: No matter what image style you want, there’s a model online that can do it – and usually, it’s free to download.

• Powerful: Though the UI may look complex, it’s remarkably powerful, and you can do almost anything AI-related.

• Train Your Models: You can train your own models based on your data since this is an open platform. Use existing images to build your very own AI tools.

• Runs Locally: Unlike many other solutions, Stable Diffusion runs locally. Nobody will know about the images you generate. If you value privacy, Stable Diffusion is your best bet. You have unlimited image generation at your fingertips.

Pricing

It’s free! There is no cost involved with setting up Stable Diffusion. Anyone can do it by following these instructions.

5. Ideogram

In less than a year, Ideogram has become one of the top Midjourney alternatives available. It’s become such a powerhouse that well-known tech firm Andreeson Horowitz invested $60 million.

Ideogram is fantastic for a few reasons, but a large part of its popularity is that it’s one of the few AI image generators that renders text remarkably well.

Most AI image generators still struggle with really legible text. Some generators, like Dall-E, have gotten better – and some are still awful at it. If you grab an old Stable Diffusion model, you’ll almost assuredly get gibberish if you try to render text.

Ideogram is entirely different. It can render legible text alongside some pretty awesome AI art too.

A new company logo? Yep, legible text with Ideogram. Do you have an idea for a T-shirt? Give it to Ideogram and it will give you an image back with your idea with readable text.  

Key Features

• High Quality: Besides rendering text well, Ideogram produces extremely high-quality imagery.

• Generous Free Tier: Ideogram’s free tier gives you 25 daily prompts in the slower queue. 

• Image Explorer: Use Ideogram’s image explorer to find inspiration for your next image. You can browse what others have made and view the associated prompts.

• Multiple Styles: Ideogram excels at both abstract and realistic images.

Pricing

Ideogram has four pricing tiers. Each price reflects the annual billing price.

• Free: 25 prompts per day in the slowest queue. Images generated in this pricing tier are public.

• Basic: 400 prompts resulting in 1,600 images in the priority queue. Additionally, you’ll get 100 prompts in the slow queue plus access to the high-quality original PNG. Images in this tier are still public. The cost is about $7 per month.

• Plus: 1,000 prompts per month in priority and unlimited in the slow queue. At this tier, image generations are private. The cost is $16 monthly.

• Pro: 3,000 prompts in the fast queue with unlimited in the slower queue. Images are private like the plus option. The cost here is $48 per month.

6. BlueWillow

BlueWillow is a fun AI image generation offering by LimeWire. You may remember LimeWire from the music-sharing and file-sharing days. It was a prevalent platform back then, so it’s a little odd for this company to have entered into the AI image generation space.

However, despite the odd pairing, BlueWillow is an impressive AI image generation service. 

BlueWillow is an aggregator of multiple models. While the exact details are proprietary, the general idea is that BlueWillow has an orchestration engine that sits on top of numerous underlying image generation models. 

Models typically have strengths and weaknesses. One model may generate photorealistic images well. Another may not.

BlueWillow’s AI orchestration engine takes the prompt and sends it to the model best suited for the task. The result is often a fantastic image!

Key Features

• Unique Technology: The AI orchestrator that selects the suitable image generation model is a nice touch you may not find with other models. 

• Relatively Low Cost: BlueWillow’s plans are reasonably priced, and you can even get started for free.

• Easy Outpainting and Upscaling: BlueWillow’s intuitive interface makes outpainting (extending an image) and upscaling a breeze. It also supports image to image transformations.

• More Than Images: BlueWillow’s AI platform also allows for music generation. LimeWire has aspirations for a bigger platform than just images, which is a good sign.

Pricing

BlueWillow has four pricing tiers.

• Free: You’ll receive up to 20 images per day for free with BlueWillow.

• Basic: The basic plan includes 2,000 images and 400 audio files per month. It costs about $8 a month when billed annually, or $10 a month when billed monthly.

• Advanced: This plan ups the images to 7,500 and includes 1,500 audio files. You’ll pay $29 per month or about $24 monthly if you choose to receive your bill annually.

• Pro: At $49 a month (about $40 monthly if billed annually), you’ll get 10,000 images and 2,000 audio files per month. You’ll also receive priority customer support if you ever run into issues.

7. Bing Image Creator

Microsoft has recently been remarkably vocal about its support for AI. They have made significant investments in OpenAI and are even launching their models.

The Bing Image Creator is their primary image generation offering. 

Under the hood, the Bing Image Creator is using Dall-E 3, thanks to Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI. Rumor has it that Bing doesn’t transform prompts as aggressively as OpenAI does.

Dall-E 3 takes your prompt and adds rules and instructions to it. Those rules are not public but instruct the model to follow certain content and safety guidelines. Bing does the same, but users report that it’s a little less restrictive.

The Bing Image generator is easy to access and free. Just go to Bing’s site and navigate to the Copilot tab. Ask it for an image, and you will get one!

Key Features

• Price: Like some of the other models in this post, this one is free. And who can argue with free?

• Quality: By utilizing Dall-E 3 under the hood, Bing produces high-quality images.

• Styles: The image generation system in Copilot excels at understanding styles. You can ask for an image in the style of Rembrandt, and it will give it to you nicely.

• You Can Use Your Microsoft Account: If you already have a Microsoft account (say for Xbox), you can sign into Bing for image generation. That’s one less account you may have to make.

Pricing

Bing Image Creator is free to use, unlike some other image generation models!

What Makes a Good Midjourney Alternative?

What makes for an excellent Midjourney alternative? Or, more succinctly, why did the platforms above make the list?

There are three key features of a good Midjourney alternative.

Speed Is Required in an AI Image Generator

Midjourney is fast. One of the most significant advantages of AI is that it can generate numerous AI art images within a short timeframe. 

Many artists and creators create tens or hundreds of images at once. They select the best of those images to augment and enhance.

Any Midjourney alternative must be equally speedy or speedier.

That’s one reason Stable Diffusion made it on the list. With the proper hardware, Stable Diffusion can quickly generate hundreds of variations of your requested image.

You can select the best one and inpaint or modify it as necessary.

That’s the type of workflow that will help you arrive at your desired image as fast as possible.

Any AI Image Generation Must Have Quality

Midjourney produces fantastic-looking images, but it doesn’t make every picture perfect. Other AI image-creation services excel at certain styles and concepts.

Any alternative should produce high-quality images that give Midjourney a run for its money. Furthermore, they should be able to draw different styles to enable concepts and ideas that Midjourney cannot support. 

Bing Image Creator, for example, satisfies this criterion. It produces stellar images that have a slightly different twist from Midjourney.

Many AI graphics designers use more than one service. They may check Midjourney’s output and compare it with something else. Any alternative should produce images of equal or more outstanding quality. Otherwise, Midjourney will always win.

It Should Be Easy to Create AI Art

Lastly, any alternative needs to be simple to use. Most of the tools above have an easy user interface that lets you start generating AI artwork as quickly as possible.

It’s about more than just a nice-looking interface, though. You need to be able to specify parameters and provide the AI generation service enough context to get the image you want.

The problem is that some Midjourney alternatives make that incredibly complex. You shouldn’t need to be an expert in generating images to produce high-quality artwork.

The tools above make generating artwork as simple as providing a concept.

With most of these tools, you only need to tell the AI what you want, and it will create some concept art for you. There’s nothing fancy about it!

Midjourney is simple – comparable alternatives have to be simple, too.

Midjourney Alternatives: Final Thoughts

The AI era is undoubtedly one of the most exciting times in technology.

The rise has given everyone the ability to create incredible images. It doesn’t matter if you are a skilled artist or someone who can’t even draw a stick figure – AI tools let you generate images that look fantastic.

Midjourney was ubiquitous with AI graphics creation. As the seven alternatives show above, that’s no longer the case. Many competitors can now create images that are equally as good or better when compared to Midjourney.

The best part is that many of these alternatives are cheaper than Midjourney – some are even free.

There’s a Midjourney alternative for you, no matter what image you’re looking to generate. Check out some options above yourself to see just how powerful they are!