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Prices and features checked against each vendor on September 28, 2026.
Midjourney is a subscription image and video generator known for its distinctive aesthetic, used through its website and Discord. As of September 2026 there are four plans: Basic at $10 per month or $96 per year, Standard at $30 per month or $288 per year, Pro at $60 per month or $576 per year, and Mega at $120 per month or $1,152 per year. Each plan is metered in fast GPU hours: 3.3 hours on Basic, 15 on Standard, 30 on Pro and 60 on Mega.
Midjourney has no free tier, so there is no way to test it without paying for at least the $10 Basic plan, and Basic has no Relax mode, so once its 3.3 fast hours are gone you stop generating until the next month. Privacy is the second sticking point: Stealth Mode, which keeps your images out of the public gallery, is only available on Pro and Mega, so private work costs a minimum of $60 per month. Midjourney's subscription terms also state that companies earning over $1,000,000 a year must be on Pro or Mega, which rules out the cheaper plans for larger businesses regardless of how much they generate.
The GPU-hour meter itself frustrates people because it is hard to translate into an image count, and video jobs share the same pool with their own concurrency caps, from 1 concurrent fast video job on Basic to 12 on Mega. Meanwhile competitors have moved to flat credit pools, daily free allowances, or pay-per-generation billing, and several now bundle image and video models from multiple labs in a single subscription. If you need a specific partner model, unlimited generation on a relaxed queue, open weights you can run yourself, or simply a free plan with commercial rights, the alternatives below cover each case.
Built from each tool's listing. Vendors can update their own listing after claiming it.
Best for: Designers who want Adobe's models plus Google, OpenAI and Flux models inside one credit pool
Adobe Firefly is Adobe's generative studio for image, video and audio, and its paid plans include partner models from Google, OpenAI, Flux and others alongside Adobe's own. The Free plan includes limited daily generations across image, video and audio. Firefly Standard is $9.99 per month for 2,000 generative credits, Firefly Pro is $19.99 per month for 4,000 credits with Adobe Express Premium and Photoshop web and mobile access, Firefly Pro Plus is $49.99 per month for 10,000 credits, and Firefly Premium offers 50,000 credits with unlimited video generation on select models. Unlimited standard image features such as Generative Fill are included at every paid tier, which is something Midjourney does not offer at all.
Best for: A free daily allowance with commercial rights and access to every image and video model
Krea is a multi-model creative tool that gives every plan, including Free, access to all image, video, 3D and lipsync models with a commercial licence. The Free plan includes 100 compute units per day and upscaling to 2K. Pro is $35 per month or $21 per month billed annually for 20,000 compute units, LoRA training on 50 images and upscaling to 22K, and Max is $105 per month or $63 annually for 60,000 units, unlimited concurrency and LoRA training on up to 2,000 images. Business is $200 per month or $160 annually with up to 50 seats, SAML SSO and an SLA. Custom model training on your own images is the standout feature Midjourney lacks.
Best for: High volumes of images and video with unlimited generation on select models
Freepik's AI generator sits inside the Freepik stock library and bundles third-party image and video models. Premium is $20 per month, or $7.25 per month on the annual rate shown at the time of checking, with 240,000 credits a year and unlimited generation on Nano Banana 2, Nano Banana Pro and Kling 2.5. Premium+ is $45 per month or $33.75 annually with 600,000 credits a year, and Pro Starter is $110 per month or $82.50 annually with 1,500,000 credits a year and 2K Nano Banana output. Because the plan also covers Freepik's stock photos, vectors and templates, it can replace a stock subscription as well as Midjourney.
Best for: A free plan with daily tokens and commercial use, plus unlimited relaxed generation on higher tiers
Leonardo.Ai is a browser-based image and video generator with its own models and fine-tuning tools. The Free plan gives 150 fast tokens that refresh every day and includes commercial use, which is the biggest contrast with Midjourney's no-free-tier policy. Essential is $10 per month billed yearly or $12 monthly, Premium is $24 per month yearly or $30 monthly and adds unlimited relaxed image generation on select models, and Ultimate is $48 per month yearly or $60 monthly with unlimited relaxed image and video generation on select models. Teams plans start from $72 for 3 seats with a shared token pool.
Best for: Occasional images alongside a general assistant, with full rights to use what you make
ChatGPT includes image creation in every plan. The Free plan has limited image generation, Go at $8 per month expands image creation, Plus at $20 per month includes complex image creation, and Pro from $100 per month includes unlimited and faster image creation. OpenAI's DALL-E 3 announcement states that images you create are yours to use without needing OpenAI's permission to reprint, sell or merchandise them. You give up Midjourney's fine-grained style controls, but you gain a chat interface that can iterate on a picture in plain language and a plan you may already be paying for.
Best for: Free image generation and editing bundled with Google storage and Workspace
Google Gemini's Free tier includes image generation and editing along with Deep Research and 15 GB of storage. Google AI Plus is $4.99 per month for 2x the Free limits, 200 Google Flow video credits and 400 GB of storage, and Google AI Pro is $19.99 per month for 4x the limits, 1,000 Flow credits and 5 TB of storage. Google AI Ultra starts at $99.99 per month with 10,000 or 25,000 Flow credits. For someone who only needs images now and then, Gemini's free tier and its $4.99 plan undercut Midjourney's $10 Basic plan while adding video.
Best for: Running open models on your own hardware with no subscription at all
Stable Diffusion is Stability AI's family of open image models, including the Stable Diffusion 3.5 suite and SDXL Turbo. Under the Stability AI Community License, individuals and organizations with less than $1M in annual revenue can use the models commercially for free, and organizations above that threshold need an Enterprise License with custom pricing. The trade-off is that you supply the compute and the interface, or use a hosted service, and there is no support line. For studios that want full control over models, privacy and cost, it is the opposite of Midjourney's closed subscription.
Best for: Developers who want pay-per-generation API access and open weights
FLUX is Black Forest Labs' family of image and video models, currently including FLUX.2, FLUX.2 Klein, FLUX.2 Max and FLUX 3 Video. BFL's pricing page states there are no subscriptions and no seat fees, only payment for what you generate, with video generation priced from $0.17 per second in its calculator; per-image API rates are shown on the vendor's pricing page. Open-weights licensing tiers are also listed with monthly image allowances, for example 10K images a month on the Builder tier. It suits teams building image generation into a product rather than people who want a finished app.
If you mainly want a Midjourney-like studio with a free plan and commercial rights, start with Leonardo.Ai or Krea; both cost less than Midjourney Standard at the paid tiers and neither charges $60 for privacy. Adobe Firefly is the pick for designers already in Creative Cloud who want partner models in one credit pool, and Freepik is the pick for volume plus stock assets. Choose Stable Diffusion or FLUX only if you can host models or call an API yourself.
