Stable Diffusion vs Midjourney vs GPT Image (OpenAI) vs Adobe Firefly
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Stable Diffusion
Open-weight image models you can run, fine-tune and ship on your own h...
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Midjourney
Prompt-to-image generator known for its aesthetics, now on V8.2
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GPT Image (OpenAI)
OpenAI's image models, DALL-E 3's successor in ChatGPT and the API
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Adobe Firefly
Adobe's AI studio for image, video and audio, wired into Creative Clou...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 7.9 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Subscription | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Self-hosted weights free under the Community License below US$1M annual revenue; 25 free API credits for new accounts | No free plan; a limited trial exists only in the niji·journey mobile app | ChatGPT Free includes limited image creation with Images 2.5; OpenAI publishes no free API allowance | Free plan with daily generations across image, video and audio, refreshed every day; includes models such as Nano Banana and Luma Ray3.14 |
| Paid from | $0.025 per image via the API (SD 3.5 Flash, 2.5 credits at $0.01 each) | $10/month (Basic), or $8/month billed annually | SGD 11/month (ChatGPT Go, as shown to a Singapore visitor), or per-token API billing | S$13.39/month incl. GST (Firefly Standard, 2,000 credits, Singapore pricing) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Widely adopted open-source model; no official central user count | ~20m users (early 2026) | 100m+ ChatGPT users with access | ~41M Creative Cloud subscribers; Firefly used to generate 22B+ assets by April 2025 |
| Founded | 2022 | 2022 | 2025 | 2023 |
| Maker | Stability AI | David Holz | OpenAI | Adobe Inc. |
| Verdict | Stable Diffusion is still the image family to pick when you need to run, fine-tune and control the model yourself: SDXL and SD 3.5 run on your own GPUs, the API is cheap per image, and the licence is free for most indivi... |
Midjourney is still the tool designers reach for when the look of an image matters most. V8.2 sharpened aesthetics and personalisation, the new edit model handles instructions, references, inpainting and outpainting, and... |
For most people GPT Image is simply the image tool already inside ChatGPT: available on the free tier, edited by conversation, and since September 2026 helped along by Sketch, templates and on-image comments. Developers... |
Firefly is the natural choice for anyone already in Creative Cloud: Generative Fill and other standard image features are unlimited on every paid plan, one credit pool covers Adobe's apps, and the model menu now includes... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.