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
The open-source image generation model that democratised AI art — run...
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Midjourney
AI image generation with a signature painterly aesthetic
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GPT Image (OpenAI)
OpenAI's image model — DALL-E's successor in ChatGPT and the API
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Adobe Firefly
Adobe's commercially-safe AI studio for image, video and audio
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 7.9 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 |
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| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
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| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Paid | Paid | Subscription |
| Free tier | Free model weights and local execution | New accounts get a 25-image free trial at full V7 quality via midjourney.com | Limited access via ChatGPT free tier | 25 generative credits per month via firefly.adobe.com |
| Paid from | Free and open-source to run locally; Stability AI's hosted API/DreamStudio is credit-based | $10/month (Basic) | $20/month (ChatGPT Plus) | Standard $9.99/mo (2,000 credits); Pro $19.99/mo (4,000 credits); higher tiers to $139.91/mo |
| 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 | — | 2021 | — | — |
| Maker | Stability AI | David Holz | OpenAI | Adobe Inc. |
| Verdict | Stable Diffusion remains the default open-weight image family: run it locally, fine-tune it, wire up ControlNet and LoRA pipelines, and pay nothing per image. That openness is why Civitai's 100,000-plus LoRAs and the Com... |
Midjourney is still the reference point for sheer aesthetic quality in AI image generation — the polished, painterly look that concept artists, designers and marketers reach for first. The V8-era models improved coherenc... |
GPT Image 2 is OpenAI's current image model — DALL-E 2 and 3 were retired May 12, 2026 — and its headline win is text: multi-line copy and even CJK scripts render reliably, which no mainstream rival matches. It reasons b... |
Firefly has grown from a cautious image generator into Adobe's whole AI studio: Image Model 5, video and audio generation, and partner models from Google, OpenAI, Runway and Black Forest Labs, all inside one credit syste... |
| 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.