Is There a Free Alternative to Midjourney?

MidJourney may be one of the most used AI art generators out there and the one you hear the most about, but is it the only option? Are there free alternatives to MidJourney?

Most AI art generators will cost you some money. That being said, there are some free options out there and some that are paid, but cheaper than MidJourney. Today, we’ll look at them and see what kind of results they can give you.

Free Alternatives to Midjourney

There are dozens of alternatives to MidJourney available, but most of them are paid. You can get a free trial, just like with MidJourney, but then you’ll have to pay.

Here are the top free alternatives to MidJourney:

  • DALL-E
  • Bing Image Creator
  • ChatGPT
  • Craiyon
  • Pollinations.ai
  • BlueWillow
  • Playground AI
  • Lexica
  • InstantArtX

To test out the free alternatives, we’ll be using the same prompts:

Prompt 1: A smiling African American child holding a daisy and smelling it, using a Canon Rebel T7 with an 18mm lens

Prompt 2: A cute cartoon elephant in a field of flowers with a blue sky overhead

DALL-E

DALL-E is run by OpenAI, the same company that offers ChatGPT. They also have DALL-E 2, but it’s not free, so that is something to consider. The results created by this AI art generator were certainly usable.

I did get errors about the server being overloaded, which was definitely an issue, particularly if you’re trying to

Bing Image Creator

Bing’s image creator is powered by DALL-E, though I found the results to be quite different. This AI art generator provides a certain number of credits that you can use to speed up the image generation. Once these run out, you can either move to slower image generation or you can purchase more credits.

Here are the results I got from our two prompts on Bing Image Creator:

ChatGPT

Wait a minute, ChatGPT is a language processing AI, how can it generate images? It turns out, there’s a way to do it! It’s actually kind of complicated and I’ve seen multiple ways to do it, so here is a video explaining how it works.

Craiyon

Another free alternative to MidJourney is Craiyon. It doesn’t seem to be quite as advanced as the others, but if you need some basic images, you can certainly use it. You may need to try a few times, since the results are anything but predictable, as you’ll see. It also takes time to produce the images, but there is a version where you can pay to get faster results.

Here are the results I got from our two prompts.

Pollinations.ai

Unfortunately, Pollinations.ai wouldn’t allow me to add my prompts. Its text boxes seemed to be disabled. Due to this, I’m leaving it here as a possibility, but know that it was unusable for me.

Another free option is Pollinations.ai, which is what we used with ChatGPT above. You can go directly to the site and use it like that. However, on the site, you have multiple options. First, you have to decide whether you want to generate an image or video. We’ll be diving into AI video a little later on on this blog, so stay tuned.

For now, we’re going with image generation. From there, you have options. You can select from four different AI generators, including Pimped Diffusion, DALL-E Mini, Majesty Diffusion, and Swinir. Each one has their pros and cons.

BlueWillow

Like MidJourney, BlueWIllow works on Discord. It is quite chaotic in the rookie channels, but you can go ahead and search for your own images under your username. The prompts and settings are all pretty much the same as MidJourney, but it’s free. Here are the results for our two prompts.

The results for the photo are very good. The cartoon is a little wonky, so I’d work on that prompt if I wanted to use BlueWillow extensively for digital art.

Playground AI

This one uses Stable Diffusion for the free version and it offers negative prompts, too. They let you create 1,000 commercially usable images per day. The interface is a bit confusing at first, since you may need to scroll down to input the prompt. It also only gives you one image at a time, but I found it to be pretty fast, so that wasn’t a big worry.

Playground AI also offers a drop down menu of art styles to choose from. I used Perfume for the image of the child and Storybook for the elephant prompt.

This AI generator did really well on art styles, but not so great when it came to realistic or photographic images.

Lexica

Lexica is not entirely free, but it gives you 100 free images that reset each month. The interface is quite easy to use, just choose Generate under the search bar and then drop in your prompt.

This site bills itself as a Stable Diffusion search engine, so you can actually search images that have been created on Stable Diffusion. You could technically grab these or you can use them to see the prompts that other people have used for images similar to the ones you want.

Here are the results from our prompts:

InstantArt

InstantArt looks almost identical to Lexica and also uses Stable Diffusion, though you can choose what AI art generator model you want from a drop down menu on the generation page. These include F222, WavyDiffusion, and MidJourney inspired. Again, you can search for other people’s images, but at the bottom of the page, there’s an option to create your own image.

I decided to try the MidJourney V4 inspired and left everything else on default. There are options to adjust image quality and number of images. Default generates two images. The more images you want, the longer it takes to generate, which makes sense. I did find this AI art generator to be a little slow, but here are the results.

Conclusion

There are lots of options available to you, even if you can’t pay for any AI art. While I would still recommend using MidJourney for photorealistic images, there’s no reason you can’t use any of the other sites on this page to create your own book illustrations, blog images, and more.

Is There a Free Alternative to Midjourney?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to top