Image generation

Text-to-image and image editing diffusion models. The open models (Stable Diffusion, FLUX, Z-Image) run locally on a 8–24 GB GPU through tools like ComfyUI; the hosted services lead on prompt-following and text rendering.

Providers

The leading hosted services — sign up and use them via app or API.

Provider	From	Strengths	Access
Midjourney v7	Midjourney	Aesthetic quality, style	App · API
Nano Banana Pro	Google	Editing, text in images, control	App · API
GPT Image	OpenAI	Prompt-following, in-chat editing	API · app
FLUX.1	Black Forest Labs	Open + Pro; photoreal, strong text	Open · API
Ideogram	Ideogram	Best-in-class text rendering	App · API
Recraft	Recraft	Brand/vector design, control	App · API
Firefly	Adobe	Commercially-safe, in Photoshop	App · API

Open-source tools

Run these yourself on a local or rented GPU. Open weights are free to use, private, and finetunable.

Stable Diffusion / SDXL

The open diffusion model that started the local-image wave.

modelopen

FLUX.1 [dev]

Black Forest Labs' open-weight model — top open quality and text.

modelopen

Z-Image

Tongyi's efficient single-stream diffusion model.

modelopen

ComfyUI

Node-graph UI for building diffusion pipelines; the power-user standard.

AUTOMATIC1111

The classic web UI for Stable Diffusion with a huge extension ecosystem.

Fooocus

Midjourney-like simplicity on top of SDXL — sensible defaults, minimal fuss.

UIeasy

Hunyuan-DiT / Hunyuan3D

Tencent's open diffusion transformers for images and 3D assets.

modelopen

iris.c

FLUX-2 image generation as pure C inference — a minimal study implementation.

learn

What you need to run it

See GPU prices to buy a card, hosting to rent one by the hour, and GPU programming to understand the libraries underneath. VRAM is the deciding factor — check each tool's model card for its memory needs.