The 8 Best Midjourney Alternatives to Try (Free & Paid)

Updated August 2026 — prices and model lineups re-checked.

Midjourney is a popular text-to-image and image-to-image generator. It’s won art competitions and set copyright precedent — but for all that, it still doesn’t have a free plan or even a free trial.

The good news is there are now lots of other apps that are similar to Midjourney, and often better than Midjourney at specific things. Whether you’re looking for a free alternative to Midjourney, an app with more options, or just a better tool for your needs, we can find the right app for you.

The Best Midjourney Alternatives

• Leonardo.Ai is the best overall alternative to Midjourney
• ChatGPT is the best chatbot alternative to Midjourney
• Canva AI is the best alternative for adding AI generated images to other work
• NightCafe is the best alternative with a community vibe
• Flux is the best alternative for customizability and open weights
• Google Gemini is the best alternative for trying Nano Banana and Veo
• Adobe Firefly is the best alternative for Creative Cloud workflows
• OpenArt is the best alternative for AI storytelling

Here’s how they compare at a glance — full details on each below.

Prices and free plans re-checked August 2026. Yearly billing shown where it’s the cheaper advertised rate.

What Is Midjourney?

Midjourney is an AI-powered image generation tool. If you give it a text prompt like “a handsome renaissance artist roaming the streets of Venice,” it will generate an image that matches. You can also use images as part of your prompt, so you can have that artist look suspiciously similar to your Instagram profile picture.

The way Midjourney and other image generators are trained allows them to understand the difference between Leonardo (renaissance artist) and Leonardo (hero in a half-shell), Lincoln (car) and Lincoln (president), and every other concept you can think of.

As well as generating images, there are a few things that make Midjourney, well, Midjourney:

• Midjourney started out as a Discord app and it’s still really community focused.
• Midjourney has always generated stylish images — V8.2, the current default, keeps that reputation intact. You can create your own personal style and tweak things so images look the way you want.
• Midjourney allows you to directly edit the images you generate.
• Midjourney generates AI videos too — but its video tool is image-to-video only, has no sound, and clips top out around 21 seconds.

So, now we know what Midjourney can do, let’s look at the best alternatives. And maybe even answer the big question: is there a better AI than Midjourney?

What to Look for in a Midjourney Alternative?

While Midjourney is well-known, it’s far from the only option for image and video generation and may not always be the best fit. If you want more flexibility, different workflows, and tools better tailored to your needs, it’s worth exploring alternatives.

Some of the big things to look for in a Midjourney alternative are:

• A freemium pricing model. Midjourney doesn’t let you try it without handing over your card details. Don’t worry though — there are now lots of Midjourney free alternatives.
• Control and customizability. AI generators don’t always nail things on the first go (or even the fifth go), so you need ways to adjust and tweak your results.
• Access to the latest models. Different AI models are better at different things, and the state of the art moves monthly. A tool that keeps adding the newest models ages a lot better than one that doesn’t.
• Commercial use and team features, at least if you want to use what you generate for any kind of business.
• A public API, if you ever want to build image generation into your own product. Midjourney doesn’t have one.
• Privacy controls. Midjourney images are public by default unless you’re on a $60+ plan with Stealth Mode.

Not every option will hit every one of these points perfectly, so focus on the features that mean the most to you.

8 Midjourney Alternatives You Can Start for Free

1. Leonardo.Ai

Best overall alternative to Midjourney

Leonardo.Ai is the best alternative to Midjourney for people who want flexibility, advanced features, and creative control.

It gives you everything you love about Midjourney: you can generate images and videos from text and image prompts, there’s an active community, and you can use anything you create for commercial purposes — even on the free plan (read more here).

Then it goes further. Leonardo always offers the latest state-of-the-art image models, including GPT-Image-2, Nano Banana 2, Seedream 5.0 Pro, and Leonardo’s own Lucid Origin. Video works the same way, with the newest models including Hailuo 2.3, Seedance 2.5, and Kling 3.0 Turbo. Omni models like GPT-Image-2 and Nano Banana 2 let you edit any image just by describing the change.

There’s plenty beyond generation, too: Blueprints give you one-click guided workflows, Character Reference keeps your hero consistent across scenes, and you can fine-tune your own models. Leonardo also generates 3D models (Rodin V2) and audio (Music v1) — and developers get a self-serve API across the latest models, something Midjourney simply doesn’t offer.

Paid plans add unlimited relaxed-rate generation on select models — for images from Premium up, and for video on Ultimate. And it’s permanent, not a promotion.

Pricing: Free plan with 150 fast tokens that refresh daily, commercial use included. Paid plans from $10/month billed yearly ($12 month-to-month).

2. ChatGPT

Best chatbot alternative to Midjourney

With ChatGPT, generating images is as easy as, well, chatting to a chatbot. Ask for an image and it will make one with OpenAI’s latest GPT Image model. [REVIEW: sources conflict on current in-app naming — "GPT Image 1.5" vs free-tier "GPT Image 2 Instant Mode"; copy kept generic]

ChatGPT still doesn’t offer Midjourney-level control. It generates one image at a time, and changes happen by asking nicely — though there’s a selection tool to make that easier. But it’s very good at restyling an image you upload (it kicked off the whole Studio Ghibli craze back in 2025), and it comes with everything else ChatGPT can do.

One nice wrinkle: you don’t need ChatGPT to use GPT Image. GPT-Image-2 is among the featured models on Leonardo, where it also powers prompt-based editing.

Pricing: Free plan with a small daily image allowance — usually a few images a day, and it fluctuates with demand. Paid plans from $8/month (ChatGPT Go [REVIEW: availability varies by region]); Plus is $20/month.

3. Canva AI

Best Midjourney alternative for adding AI generated images to other work

Tools like Midjourney are often just the first step in a creative workflow. You generate an image, but then you need to do something with it — share it to social media, add it to your funny birthday card design, or drop it into a slide deck.

With Canva, you skip the app-switching. Generate an image with Dream Lab and add it to any of the millions of templates, all without leaving Canva. A fun bit of trivia: Dream Lab runs on a model built on Leonardo’s Phoenix architecture — Canva is our parent company, so consider us biased, but also well informed.

The honest framing: Canva is a design workflow with AI inside; Leonardo is a dedicated creative-AI studio with model choice and an API. Plenty of people use both.

Pricing: Free plan with a handful of Dream Lab generations a month (about five); Canva Pro from around $15/month.

4. NightCafe

Best Midjourney alternative with a community vibe

If you want that chaotic community feeling, NightCafe is still the best Midjourney alternative. It gives you access to a variety of models — Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 3, and Flux among them — plus countless fine-tuned community models designed to create everything from dark portraits to antique watercolors.

As for the community: there are daily challenges, streak rewards for showing up regularly, and you can follow other creators, like and comment on their images, and see exactly what prompt, model, and settings they used. Great way to get inspired.

Pricing: 5 free credits per login day, plus bonus credits for daily challenges and streaks — and unlimited base Stable Diffusion generations. Paid plans from $5.99/month.

5. Flux

Best Midjourney alternative for customizability

Flux is a family of models from Black Forest Labs. The current generation is FLUX.2, which spans open-weight models you can run on your own hardware (Klein, and the local-only Dev) and hosted models (Pro, Flex, Max) available through BFL’s playground and API.

Flux’s big advantage is still customizability. The open-weight licensing is permissive, anyone can fine-tune a Flux model, and the API is priced per image — from about $0.014 — rather than by subscription.

The trade-off is that Black Forest Labs is a model lab, not a creative studio, so the tooling around the models is minimal. That’s why you’ll most often meet Flux inside other apps: FLUX 3 Video is among Leonardo’s featured video models, and NightCafe offers Flux image models.

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go from around $0.014/image via the playground or API; open-weight variants are free to self-host if you have the hardware.

6. Google Gemini

Best Midjourney alternative for trying Nano Banana and Veo

Google Gemini is Google’s chatbot, but it’s also the front door to two very good model families: Nano Banana (Google’s image generation and editing line with the unforgettable name) and Veo (its video model).

Nano Banana’s party trick is editing — describe a change and it happens, with faces and products staying recognizable. Veo, meanwhile, produces remarkably realistic footage from a text prompt; the demo videos speak for themselves.

The catch is the free tier: a couple of watermarked images a day, and serious Veo use needs a paid Google AI plan. If you want the same model families with more room to work, Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro are featured models on Leonardo, and Veo 3.1 is available there too.

Pricing: Free plan with a small daily image allowance (watermarked); Google AI Pro from $19.99/month. [REVIEW: a cheaper "AI Plus" tier at $7.99/month appears in sources — confirm availability before publish]

7. Adobe Firefly

Best Midjourney alternative for Creative Cloud workflows

Firefly started life as Adobe’s in-house image model. These days it’s a full aggregator — 30+ partner models alongside Adobe’s own — woven directly into Creative Cloud. If your day already happens in Photoshop and Premiere, Firefly is the path of least resistance.

Two things worth knowing before you commit. Adobe’s “unlimited standard generations” offer on paid plans is a limited-time promotion, not a permanent plan feature — Leonardo’s unlimited relaxed generation on select models is permanent, if that matters to you. And Firefly’s API is enterprise-only, so there’s no self-serve option for developers.

Pricing: Free plan with 25 generative credits per month; paid plans from $9.99/month (Standard) up to $199.99/month (Premium).

8. OpenArt

Best Midjourney alternative for AI storytelling

OpenArt aggregates more than a hundred models — including Sora 2 and Veo 3 — and points them at one job: storytelling. Tools like Director and One-Click Story help you plan characters and scenes across a whole narrative rather than one image at a time.

The main gotcha is the free plan: 40 one-time trial credits, and that’s it. For comparison, Leonardo’s free plan gives you 150 tokens that refresh every single day.

Pricing: 40 one-time free credits; paid plans from about $14/month, roughly half that on annual billing. [REVIEW: sources conflict on the exact entry price — check openart.ai/pricing before publish]

Which Midjourney Alternative Is Right for You?

If you found this article wondering whether there’s a free alternative to Midjourney, hopefully this list has answered with a resounding yes. Every app here has a free plan or a free way in — which is exactly one more than Midjourney offers.

You don’t have to commit to just one tool, either. Try a few and see what fits.

With that said, if you’re only going to try one app, Leonardo.Ai is a great place to start. It has all of Midjourney’s core features, plus the latest models — GPT-Image-2, Nano Banana 2, Seedream 5.0 Pro, and Leonardo’s own Lucid Origin for images; Hailuo 2.3, Seedance 2.5, and Kling 3.0 Turbo for video — along with a free plan you can use commercially and an API for when you’re ready to build.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free alternative to Midjourney?

Yes — several. Leonardo.Ai has the most generous free plan on this list: 150 fast tokens that refresh every day, with commercial use included. Midjourney itself has no free plan and hasn’t offered a free trial since 2023.

What is the best Midjourney alternative?

It depends on what you’re after — Canva if you live in design templates, Firefly if you live in Photoshop. For most people, though, Leonardo.Ai is the strongest all-rounder: it covers Midjourney’s core strengths and adds the latest image and video models, 3D and audio generation, and a public API.

Does Midjourney have an API?

No — there’s no official Midjourney API, and third-party wrappers violate Midjourney’s terms of service. If you want to build image generation into your own product, Leonardo offers a self-serve API across its latest models, including GPT-Image-2 and Lucid Origin.

Which Midjourney alternatives can generate video?

Leonardo.Ai (with the latest models including Hailuo 2.3, Seedance 2.5, and Kling 3.0 Turbo), Google Gemini (Veo), Adobe Firefly, and OpenArt all generate video. Midjourney’s own video tool is image-to-video only, has no sound, and tops out around 21 seconds.

Can I use images from these tools commercially?

It varies a lot. Leonardo allows commercial use even on the free plan. Many other tools restrict free-tier outputs with watermarks or non-commercial terms — always check the current terms of whichever tool you pick before you ship anything.

Try Leonardo.Ai for free today