Choosing the right AI image model

The model you pick changes the result more than almost anything except the prompt itself. Here is what each one is genuinely good at, judged by whether the output holds up as a print someone pays for.

Quick answers

Midjourney

Midjourney has a house style — warm, atmospheric, slightly cinematic — and that style is why it remains popular for art rather than illustration. It flatters landscape, portraiture and anything with weather in it.

It returns four variations per run, which is genuinely useful early on: you see four readings of your prompt instead of one. It is less useful once you know exactly what you want, because you pay for all four.

Three speeds are available. Relax is cheapest and can queue for several minutes. Fast is the sensible default. Turbo costs most and returns quickest. The image quality is the same; you are buying queue position.

OpenAI GPT Image

This is the family to reach for when your prompt is long and specific and you need it honoured. If you write "a woman in a green coat holding a blue umbrella, facing away, on a cobbled street", GPT Image will give you those things, in those colours, in that arrangement. Midjourney will give you something beautiful that may have got the umbrella wrong.

GPT Image 2 is the strongest and most expensive; GPT Image 1 mini costs half as much and is a sensible drafting choice when you are still working out the composition.

GPT Image also handles text in images better than most, so it is a reasonable second choice for posters. It is one of the more expensive options per image, so it earns its place on final renders rather than exploration.

Google Gemini

Gemini's image models are the photorealism specialists. Natural light, skin, foliage and water all come out convincingly, and they handle the widest range of aspect ratios of anything on this list. If you are making work that should look photographed rather than painted, start here.

Gemini 3 Pro Image costs more but holds up better under close inspection. Worth it for a piece you intend to print large; overkill for a thumbnail test, where Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image does the job for a fraction of the credits.

Black Forest Labs FLUX

FLUX 1.1 Pro produces the most fine detail of anything on the list, which is exactly what matters when the file is going to be enlarged. Textures — bark, fabric, stone, hair — survive scaling better than they do from most models.

FLUX Schnell is at the other end: very cheap, very fast, good enough to test whether a composition works before you spend real credits on it. A lot of experienced users draft on Schnell and finish on 1.1 Pro.

FLUX runs as a queued job, so results arrive a little after you press generate rather than instantly.

Stability AI Stable Diffusion

The widest stylistic range for the lowest cost. Stable Image Core is one to two credits an image, which makes it the natural choice when you want to see twenty interpretations of an idea. Stable Image Ultra costs more and is noticeably stronger on coherence.

Stability responds well to explicit medium and technique language — naming a process like "linocut" or "gouache on board" shifts the output more than it does on some competitors.

Ideogram

If the artwork contains words, use Ideogram. Nothing else on this list renders typography as reliably. Quote prints, event posters, shop signage in an illustration, a book cover mockup — this is the model.

Three speeds are offered. Turbo is cheap enough for drafting; Quality is worth it once the wording is final, because a nearly-correct letterform is worse than none.

Replicate, fal.ai and Grok

Replicate and fal.ai are hosted runtimes rather than model makers — they give access to open models including FLUX variants, SDXL and Recraft, often at very low cost. Useful for breadth and for styles the first-party APIs do not offer.

xAI's Grok image model is fast and inexpensive, currently square-only, and best treated as an exploration tool.

A workflow that keeps costs sane

1. Draft on a 1–2 credit model until the composition and subject are right. Expect to run this five or ten times.
2. Compare the winning prompt across two or three candidate models, one image each. Models differ more than you expect on the same words.
3. Finish on whichever won, at the largest sensible size, once.

Done this way a finished, sellable piece typically costs under ten credits all in, including the failures.

A note on commercial rights

Each provider sets its own terms for commercial use of the images its model produces, and those terms change. Before you build a whole product line on one model, read that provider's current policy. It is a five-minute job that occasionally saves a very bad afternoon.

See the full model list for what is available on your account and what each one currently costs.