Midjourney

Midjourney is a text-to-image generator with a distinctive, painterly aesthetic that made it a favorite of illustrators, concept artists, marketers and hobbyists. It began as a Discord bot and still runs there, but most work now happens in its web app, which adds an editor for inpainting, retexturing and extending images, style and character references for consistent output, personalization, moodboards, an upscaler and an image-to-video mode that animates stills into short clips. Shared Rooms let several people generate together in one feed.

There is no free plan or trial. Basic costs $10 per month ($8 billed annually) for about 3.3 fast GPU hours, roughly 200 images; Standard is $30 ($24 annually) with 15 fast hours plus unlimited slower Relax generation; Pro is $60 ($48) and Mega $120 ($96) with 30 and 60 fast hours. Video jobs consume far more GPU time than images. Stealth mode, which keeps generations out of the public gallery, is only on Pro and Mega, and companies above $1 million in annual revenue must use those tiers for commercial work.

What to know: prompts and parameters take practice, rendered text is unreliable, there is no public API, and the company is defending copyright lawsuits from major studios.