Midjourney

Midjourney is a text-to-image generator with a house style, and that is both the product and the criticism. It has consistently produced the most immediately attractive default output of any image model — lighting, composition and material rendering that look considered rather than assembled — and the trade is that images from it are often recognisable as coming from it. It began as a Discord bot and still runs there, but there is now a full web application at midjourney.com where you generate, browse your history, edit and organise, so the "you have to learn Discord first" objection has largely gone. The controls that matter are parameters rather than prompts: aspect ratio, stylize (how much of the house aesthetic to apply), chaos (variation across the initial grid), and weird. Image prompts and style references let you carry a look across a set, which is what makes it usable for a brand rather than for one-off pictures. There is also a video generation mode, which is where the heaviest compute goes. Pricing is paid only — there is no free tier. Basic is $10 a month, Standard $30, Pro $60 and Mega $120, each about 20% cheaper billed annually ($8, $24, $48 and $96). The unit you are buying is fast GPU time, not a number of images: 3.3 hours on Basic, 15 on Standard, 30 on Pro and 60 on Mega. A still image costs roughly a GPU minute, while video costs an order of magnitude more, so Basic is a few hundred stills and Standard adds unlimited generations in the slower relax queue, which is the single biggest jump in practical value. Stealth mode, which keeps your generations out of the public gallery, only starts at Pro — everything on the cheaper plans is visible to other users. The real limitations are control and text. It is deliberately opinionated, so precise layout instructions are harder to land than in tools built around editing, and rendering long strings of legible text remains its weakest area. Against DALL·E inside ChatGPT, Midjourney is better looking and worse at following literal instructions. Ideogram is the one to reach for when the image has to contain readable text. Stable Diffusion and Flux, run locally or through a host, trade convenience for total control, custom models and no per-image cost. Adobe Firefly is the choice when the licensing provenance of the training data has to satisfy a legal team. Choose Midjourney when the picture has to be beautiful. Choose something else when it has to be exact.