Midjourney vs Stability AI
Stability AI uniquely has 11 features.
| Midjourney | Stability AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Company | ||
| Founded | 2022 | 2019 |
| HQ | San Francisco, USA | London, United Kingdom |
| AI model | Proprietary (Midjourney V6.1 / V7 / V8 Alpha) | Stable Diffusion (SDXL, SD3, and proprietary variants) |
| User base | 20M+ | 1M+ |
| Platforms | Web, Discord | Web, API, Self-Hosted, Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) |
| Languages | English primary (multilingual prompt support) | English primary |
| Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | Subscription | Credit-based |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | No (discontinued March 2023) | Yes |
| Starting price | $10/mo (Basic) | $19/mo |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
| Refund policy | No refunds (strict no-refund policy) | — |
| All plans | Basic$10/moStandard$30/moPro$60/moMega$120/mo | TrialFreeCreator$19/moCore$50/moEnterpriseCustom |
| Positioning | ||
| Best for | Artists, designers, and creatives seeking high-aesthetic AI image generation | Creative professionals and teams needing AI image generation and editing |
| Differentiator | Midjourney sets the aesthetic benchmark for AI image generation with its distinctive cinematic, painterly style and is widely regarded as producing the most visually stunning outputs in the industry. | Stability AI offers open-weight and self-hostable generative models across image, video, audio, and 3D with enterprise-grade brand customization via Brand Studio — uniquely combining open-source accessibility with fully licensed training data and custom foundation model training. |
| Competitors | DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Ideogram, Leonardo AI | Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, DALL-E 3 (OpenAI), Runway, Leonardo AI |
| Features | ||
| Curated Model Routing | — | ✓ |
| End to End Generation and Editing | — | ✓ |
| Precision Inpainting | — | ✓ |
| Product Insertion | — | ✓ |
| Recoloring | — | ✓ |
| Sketch to Image | — | ✓ |
| Aspect Ratio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Background Removal | ✓ | ✓ |
| Batch Generation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Commercial Rights | ✓ | ✓ |
| ControlNet | ✕ | ✓ |
| Export Formats | PNG, JPG (WEBP on web platform) | PNG, JPG and standard image/video formats |
| Image Animation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Image Reference | ✓ | ✓ |
| Image to Image | ✓ | ✓ |
| Inpainting | ✓ | ✓ |
| LoRA Support | ✕ | ✓ |
| Negative Prompts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Outpainting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private Generations | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt Customization | ✓ | ✓ |
| Style Controls | ✓ | ✓ |
| Text to Image | ✓ | ✓ |
| Text to Video | ✓ | ✓ |
| Upscaling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Video Style Transfer | — | ✓ |
| Video Upscaling | — | ✓ |
| Watermark | ✕ | — |
| Integrations | ||
| API Access | ✓ | ✓ |
| Canva Integration | ✕ | — |
| Figma Plugin | ✕ | — |
| Key Integrations | Discord (primary interface), Midjourney Web App, limited API for developers | Platform API, Amazon Bedrock (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Self-Hosted License, Electronic Arts partnership, UMG partnership, HubSpot |
| Photoshop Plugin | ✕ | ✓ |