AI Art & Image Generators: DALL·E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion Compared

AI image generators have converged on similar visual quality, but their business models remain fundamentally different. DALL·E operates as a pay-per-image API service with straightforward ownership transfer. Midjourney uses subscription plans tied to GPU time and imposes revenue-based licensing gates. Stable Diffusion offers open-weight models with licensing tied to commercial revenue thresholds and the option to run entirely offline.

This comparison focuses on what these differences mean for teams evaluating which platform to integrate into production workflows, where licensing constraints surface, and which pricing models are sustainable at scale.

DALL·E 3 is OpenAI's image generation model, available exclusively through the API. Pricing is based on resolution and quality tier. Standard quality at 1024×1024 costs $0.04 per image. Standard at 1024×1536 or 1536×1024 costs $0.08 per image. HD quality at 1024×1024 costs $0.08 per image. HD at 1024×1536 or 1536×1024 costs $0.12 per image.

This pricing structure is transparent and predictable. You pay only for images generated, with no subscription overhead or unused capacity. For teams generating variable volumes—heavy production some months, light usage others—the pay-per-use model avoids the waste of fixed subscriptions.

OpenAI's Terms of Use state that you retain ownership of input and own the output, with OpenAI assigning its rights in output to you to the extent permitted by law. The terms also note that output may not be unique and others may receive similar results from similar prompts. This ownership transfer is clearer than platforms where licensing depends on subscription tier or company revenue.

The constraint is that DALL·E 3 is API-only. You need to build or integrate an application layer to use it—this is not a web tool where you type prompts and download images manually. For developers and product teams, this is expected. For designers and marketers without engineering support, it's a barrier.

OpenAI also offers image generation inside ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4o rather than DALL·E 3 exclusively. This provides a web interface for users who need manual generation, but it operates under ChatGPT's subscription model rather than DALL·E's per-image API pricing. Free ChatGPT users can generate a limited number of images. Paid subscribers get higher limits. This dual offering creates confusion around which OpenAI image tool to use, but the distinction is clear: API for programmatic workflows, ChatGPT for manual creation.

Midjourney operates on subscription plans structured around Fast GPU time allocations. Basic is $10 per month or $96 annually and includes 3.3 hours of Fast GPU time per month. Standard is $30 per month or $288 annually and includes 15 hours of Fast GPU time. Pro is $60 per month or $576 annually and includes 30 hours of Fast GPU time. Mega is $120 per month or $1,152 annually and includes 60 hours of Fast GPU time. Annual plans include a discount.

The critical feature distinctions are Relax Mode and Stealth Mode. Relax Mode offers unlimited image generation without consuming Fast GPU time, but generation is slower and queued behind Fast Mode users. Relax Mode is available on Standard, Pro, and Mega plans—not on Basic. This means Basic subscribers are capped by their monthly Fast GPU allocation with no overflow capacity.

Stealth Mode makes your images and prompts private, hiding them from Midjourney's public gallery and other users. This is only available on Pro and Mega plans. Basic and Standard users have all their creations visible to the Midjourney community by default, which is a significant constraint for commercial work involving unreleased products, confidential campaigns, or client projects under NDA.

Midjourney's Terms of Service impose a revenue-based ownership requirement. If you are a company or an employee of a company generating over $1,000,000 USD annual revenue, you must be subscribed to Pro or Mega to own the assets you create. Companies under that threshold can use any tier and retain ownership. This creates a pricing floor for larger businesses: the minimum subscription for legal commercial use is Pro at $60 per month, regardless of whether you need 30 hours of Fast GPU time or the privacy that Stealth Mode provides.

These gates matter most for agencies, product companies, and marketing teams. If you're a solo creator or startup under $1M revenue, Basic or Standard plans are viable. If you're part of a company exceeding that threshold, Pro is the minimum legally compliant tier, and Stealth Mode becomes essential if your work involves confidential projects.

Stable Diffusion is an open-weight model family distributed by Stability AI. The core distinction is that you can download the model and run it locally or on your own cloud infrastructure rather than using a hosted API or web interface. This deployment flexibility is Stable Diffusion's primary differentiator from DALL·E and Midjourney.

Stability AI's licensing is structured around a revenue threshold similar to Midjourney but applied differently. The Community License allows free use for research, non-commercial purposes, and commercial purposes for individuals or organizations generating under $1,000,000 USD annual revenue. If you or your organization exceed that threshold and are using Stable Diffusion for commercial purposes, the license terminates and you must request an enterprise license from Stability AI.

Commercial users must register with Stability AI, even if they fall under the $1M revenue threshold. This registration requirement is explicitly stated in the Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium license text and is designed to track commercial usage and enforce the revenue-based licensing boundary.

The operational advantage of Stable Diffusion is on-device or self-hosted generation. You can run the model on local hardware or private cloud infrastructure without sending prompts or images to a third-party service. This matters for teams with data privacy requirements, workflows involving sensitive content, or use cases where internet connectivity is unreliable. AMD and Stability AI collaborated to demonstrate Stable Diffusion 3.0 Medium running locally on Ryzen AI laptops, illustrating the viability of offline generation for mobile or edge deployments.

The trade-off is that self-hosting requires GPU resources and technical expertise. You need to set up the model, manage dependencies, handle updates, and scale compute capacity as usage grows. For teams without ML engineering support, this overhead eliminates Stable Diffusion from consideration unless they use a hosted service that wraps the model, in which case the hosting provider's pricing and terms apply instead.

Understanding how each platform's pricing scales with production volume is essential for budgeting.

DALL·E's per-image API pricing is the most predictable. If you generate 1,000 images per month at standard 1024×1024 resolution, the cost is $40. If you generate 10,000 images, the cost is $400. There's no subscription waste if your volume drops, and no quota caps that force you to upgrade tiers. The constraint is that you need to integrate the API and handle generation programmatically, which requires engineering time upfront.

Midjourney's subscription model creates fixed monthly costs regardless of usage. Basic at $10 per month is affordable for testing but lacks Relax Mode, meaning you're capped by 3.3 hours of Fast GPU time. Standard at $30 per month adds unlimited Relax Mode, which solves capacity constraints for high-volume users willing to accept slower generation. Pro at $60 per month is required for companies over $1M revenue and for users who need Stealth Mode privacy. This structure means larger businesses pay at minimum $60 per month per user even if they generate fewer images than would justify that cost under a pay-per-use model.

Stable Diffusion has no direct cost if you self-host and stay under $1M revenue, but you pay for compute infrastructure. Running Stable Diffusion on cloud GPUs incurs hourly costs that vary by provider and instance type. Running locally requires purchasing or leasing GPU hardware. For teams generating high volumes, these infrastructure costs can exceed Midjourney subscriptions. For teams generating occasional images, self-hosting is expensive overhead compared to subscription models.

The revenue threshold licensing in both Midjourney and Stable Diffusion creates a cliff: once your company crosses $1M annual revenue, your costs jump. Midjourney requires upgrading to Pro at $60 per month minimum. Stable Diffusion requires negotiating enterprise licensing with Stability AI, with pricing that is not publicly documented and likely varies based on deployment scale and commercial use case.

The legal rights to use generated images commercially vary significantly across platforms and depend on subscription tier and company revenue.

OpenAI's Terms of Use for DALL·E are the clearest: you own the output, and OpenAI assigns its rights in the output to you. The caveat is that output may not be unique—someone else could generate a similar or identical image from a similar prompt. This is inherent to generative AI and applies across all platforms, but OpenAI states it explicitly.

Midjourney's ownership terms are revenue-dependent. You own all assets you create, subject to exceptions. The primary exception is the revenue gate: if you are a company or employee of a company with over $1,000,000 USD annual revenue, you must be subscribed to Pro or Mega to own your assets. This term became effective April 17, 2025. Companies under that threshold own their assets on any tier. If you upscale or modify someone else's Midjourney image, the original creator retains ownership—you don't gain rights by editing another user's work.

Stable Diffusion's Community License allows commercial use under $1M revenue, but the license terminates if you exceed that threshold while using the model commercially. At that point, you must negotiate an enterprise license with Stability AI. The original Stable Diffusion release used the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license, which allowed commercial and non-commercial usage with an emphasis on ethical responsibility, but newer versions like Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium use the revenue-gated Community License structure.

For small businesses, solo creators, and startups under $1M revenue, all three platforms allow commercial use. For established companies above that threshold, DALL·E has no revenue gate—you simply pay per image. Midjourney requires Pro or Mega. Stable Diffusion requires enterprise licensing. This makes DALL·E the simplest option for larger businesses that want to avoid tier-jumping or license negotiations as revenue grows.

Whether your generated images are visible to the platform provider or other users matters for confidential work, unreleased products, or client projects under NDA.

DALL·E's API terms state that OpenAI does not use API data to train models unless you explicitly opt in. Your prompts and generated images are not public by default, though OpenAI may review content for policy compliance. This makes DALL·E suitable for confidential commercial work without requiring special privacy tiers.

Midjourney's default behavior is public visibility. All images and prompts created on Basic and Standard tiers are visible in Midjourney's community gallery and can be viewed by other users. Stealth Mode, which makes your creations private, is only available on Pro and Mega plans. This means the minimum cost for private image generation is Pro at $60 per month.

For agencies working on client campaigns, product teams designing unreleased features, or marketers testing concepts before launch, public visibility is unacceptable. Midjourney's Stealth Mode gate forces these users into higher tiers regardless of whether they need the GPU time or other features those plans include.

Stable Diffusion offers complete privacy by default if you self-host. Your prompts and images never leave your infrastructure. If you use a third-party hosted service running Stable Diffusion, privacy depends on that provider's terms—not on Stability AI's licensing.

How you access and integrate image generation affects both workflow efficiency and total cost of ownership.

DALL·E is API-first. You integrate it into applications, automation workflows, or custom tools. OpenAI provides rate limits that scale with usage tier—higher-tier API customers can generate more images per minute. This model is designed for product teams embedding image generation into their own platforms, SaaS tools offering AI features to end users, or automation workflows where images are generated programmatically based on triggers.

Midjourney is interface-first. You generate images through Discord or the Midjourney web interface by typing prompts and receiving results. This is simpler for manual workflows—designers iterating on concepts, marketers creating ad assets, illustrators exploring visual ideas—but it doesn't support programmatic generation at scale. Midjourney does not offer a public API, which limits integration into custom applications or automated pipelines.

Stable Diffusion's open-weight distribution allows any deployment model. You can run it locally on a workstation, deploy it on cloud infrastructure with custom APIs, integrate it into applications, or use third-party services that host the model. This flexibility is Stable Diffusion's strength for technical teams, but it requires expertise to implement and maintain. For teams without ML infrastructure experience, the deployment burden outweighs the licensing benefits unless they use a managed service.

AI image generators face ongoing legal challenges around training data and copyright infringement claims. These disputes don't directly affect day-to-day usage but create uncertainty around long-term viability and potential liability.

Warner Bros. sued Midjourney in 2025 over alleged copyright infringement related to the platform's ability to generate images resembling well-known characters. The case highlights concerns that training data may include copyrighted material and that generated outputs can reproduce protected works closely enough to raise infringement questions.

This risk is not unique to Midjourney. DALL·E and Stable Diffusion face similar scrutiny over training data sources and whether generated images infringe on existing copyrights. The legal landscape remains unsettled, and buyers should understand that using any AI image generator involves some risk that future court decisions could impose liability, restrict capabilities, or require changes to how platforms operate.

For risk-averse organizations, this uncertainty is a reason to avoid AI-generated images entirely or to use them only for internal work rather than customer-facing assets. For most businesses, the practical approach is to avoid prompts that explicitly reference copyrighted characters, brands, or artists' names and to treat AI-generated images as starting points requiring human review and modification before publication.

Midjourney's Relax Mode is positioned as unlimited generation, but the trade-offs matter for understanding when it's practical.

Relax Mode allows you to generate images without consuming Fast GPU time, but your requests are queued behind users in Fast Mode. This means generation can take significantly longer—minutes or hours rather than seconds. For workflows where speed matters—client presentations, campaign deadlines, rapid iteration—Relax Mode's delays make it impractical even though it's technically unlimited.

Relax Mode is available on Standard, Pro, and Mega plans but not on Basic. This means the entry tier for unlimited generation is Standard at $30 per month. For users who generate high volumes and can tolerate slower speeds, this provides capacity that would be expensive under DALL·E's per-image pricing or would require significant GPU investment with Stable Diffusion.

The value proposition depends entirely on your workflow's tolerance for latency. If you're producing marketing assets on tight deadlines, Fast Mode is necessary and Relax Mode is backup capacity. If you're exploring concepts, building libraries, or generating assets for future use, Relax Mode's slower speed is acceptable in exchange for unlimited volume.

Stable Diffusion's open-weight distribution enables workflows that are impossible with DALL·E or Midjourney.

You can run Stable Diffusion entirely offline on local hardware. This is valuable for teams with air-gapped environments, data sovereignty requirements, or workflows in locations without reliable internet. The AMD collaboration demonstrating Stable Diffusion 3.0 Medium running on Ryzen AI laptops shows that consumer-grade hardware can support local generation, though performance and image quality depend on the specific model variant and hardware capabilities.

Offline generation also eliminates per-image costs and subscription fees once you've invested in the hardware. For teams generating thousands of images monthly, this can be cheaper than DALL·E's API fees or Midjourney's subscriptions, but only if you account for the upfront hardware investment and ongoing maintenance overhead.

The privacy benefit is absolute. Your prompts and images never leave your infrastructure, which is the strongest possible privacy guarantee. For defense contractors, healthcare organizations, or financial institutions with strict data handling policies, this is often a requirement that eliminates cloud-based alternatives regardless of cost.

The downside is complexity. You need GPU hardware or cloud instances, you need to manage model updates, you need to handle scaling if demand increases, and you need expertise to troubleshoot when generation quality degrades or dependencies break. For most small businesses, this overhead is not justified unless privacy or offline capability is a hard requirement.

The three platforms produce images with different aesthetic tendencies, though quality has largely converged.

DALL·E 3 is optimized for prompt adherence and compositional accuracy. It tends to produce images that closely match the described scene, layout, and elements. This makes it reliable for specific use cases where the image must include particular objects or arrangements—product mockups, instructional diagrams, or concept illustrations with defined requirements.

Midjourney is known for producing aesthetically polished images with strong color grading, dramatic lighting, and artistic coherence. The platform tends toward visually striking outputs even when prompts are simple, which makes it popular for marketing assets, social content, and creative exploration. The trade-off is that Midjourney sometimes prioritizes aesthetic appeal over strict prompt adherence, which can frustrate users who need specific compositions or elements.

Stable Diffusion's output quality depends on which model variant you use and how you configure generation parameters. The base models are powerful but require more prompt engineering and parameter tuning to achieve results comparable to DALL·E or Midjourney's default output. Community-developed fine-tuned models, LoRAs, and custom training can produce highly specialized results, but this requires technical knowledge and experimentation.

For most users, aesthetic preference and prompt adherence matter more than objective quality differences. Test each platform with your actual use cases—product images, character designs, marketing visuals—to see which output style aligns with your needs.

For most businesses and creators under $1M annual revenue who need fast, private image generation with unlimited capacity and are comfortable with subscription pricing, Midjourney is the better choice because the Standard plan at $30 per month offers unlimited Relax Mode generation and the Pro plan at $60 per month adds Stealth Mode privacy. Midjourney's interface is designed for manual creation and iteration, making it practical for designers, marketers, and content creators who work with images directly rather than embedding generation into automated workflows. The platform's aesthetic tendencies toward polished, visually striking images make it better suited for marketing and creative work where visual appeal matters more than strict adherence to technical specifications.

DALL·E is a stronger choice for product teams and developers who need API integration for programmatic image generation and want transparent per-image costs without subscription overhead. The pay-per-use model at $0.04 to $0.12 per image is more cost-effective than subscriptions for teams with variable generation volumes, and the clear ownership transfer under OpenAI's Terms of Use eliminates revenue-based licensing gates. DALL·E is better for teams embedding image generation into applications, SaaS products, or automation workflows where images are generated in response to user actions or system triggers. If your workflow is API-driven and you need predictable costs that scale linearly with usage, DALL·E's pricing is simpler than managing subscription tiers.

Stable Diffusion is best suited for teams that need offline generation, complete data privacy, or want to avoid subscription costs at high volumes—provided they have the technical expertise to self-host and maintain the model. The Community License allows free commercial use under $1M revenue, making it the lowest-cost option for small businesses and startups willing to invest in infrastructure and engineering. Teams exceeding $1M revenue must negotiate enterprise licensing, which positions Stable Diffusion as viable for very small businesses or very large enterprises but less practical for mid-market companies that would face licensing renegotiation as they grow. If your workflow requires on-device generation for privacy, regulatory, or connectivity reasons, Stable Diffusion is the only option that supports true offline deployment.