Best AI Image Generators

For most people the answer is Midjourney: it produces the most consistently attractive images with the least prompt effort, and costs $10 per month. If you need legible text inside the image — a poster, a logo, a mockup — Ideogram is the better choice. If the images have to be commercially safe for a client, Adobe Firefly is trained on licensed material. And if you want to run a generator on your own hardware without a subscription, Stable Diffusion and FLUX are the open-source options.

There is no single best generator, because the four questions that decide it are different questions: how good does it look, does it need text in the image, who owns the output, and does it have to run locally. The table below sorts by our editorial rating and names what each one is actually first choice for.