Midjourney Review (2024): Pros, Cons, and Features of the AI Tool
Quick Take: Midjourney generates vibrant, detailed, and high-quality images from text prompts, letting you choose from extensive artistic styles and rely on an active community for support and prompt crafting tips. Despite some occasional inconsistent outputs and a steep initial learning curve, the generative AI tool’s community support and impressive results make it a valuable asset for artists, designers, and content creators.
Midjourney AI Quick Facts
Our Rating: 3.8/5
Pricing: $10 to $120 per month
Key Features:
- Text-to-image generation
- High image resolution
- Creative control and customization
- Concurrent jobs
- Sharing and collaboration
Midjourney is a powerful image generator hosted by an independent research lab in San Francisco. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create stunning images based on textual descriptions and refine generated images in various artistic styles. Midjourney is popular for its active user community of more than 20 million users who access the platform through Discord or the website. The current version of the Midjourney image model, V6.1, features more coherent images, better image quality, and a new personalization approach with improved nuance and accuracy over previous versions.
Midjourney Review: What You Need to Know
Who It’s Best For: Individuals and businesses looking for a powerful text-to-image solution that creates high-quality and vibrant images.
| Pros: | Cons: |
|---|---|
| • Highly accurate images • Extensive online gallery • Active community of over 20 million users • Capable of high-speed renders | • No free version or trial • Limited video generation feature • Steep initial learning curve • Limited customer support |
Continue reading to learn more about Midjourney’s pricing, core features, ease of use, and customer support, or skip ahead to see how I tested the software and evaluated it across six main categories.
Featured Partners: AI Software
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who Should Use Midjourney?
Midjourney AI is a robust text-to-image platform that offers valuable resources to users and businesses. It’s particularly well-suited for the following use cases and applications:
- Content Creators Who Need Vibrant, High-Quality Images: Midjourney’s ability to generate vibrant and realistic images can help creators design engaging content—for example, a blogger can use Midjourney to create custom illustrations for articles, while social media managers can generate eye-catching graphics for posts on various platforms. Creators can also take inspiration from public designs featured on Midjourney’s Explore page.
- Users Who Want to Interact with an Active Community: With more than 20 million active users, Midjourney is especially accessible through Discord. Creators who prefer to use Discord can easily interact with Midjourney’s bot, generate images, and share their creations with their communities.
- Marketers Seeking to Create Attractive Campaigns: Midjourney can be a valuable resource for marketers seeking to create engaging and effective campaigns by letting them customize visual assets and personalize content to specific audiences. For example, a marketing team could use Midjourney to generate product mockups, social media graphics, or advertising campaigns.
Who Shouldn’t Use Midjourney?
While Midjourney AI offers a wide range of benefits for individuals and businesses, it may not be the right fit for everyone, including the following use cases:
- Content Creators Who Need an All-in-One Video Generator: Midjourney excels at generating vivid images, but it’s not designed to create videos—and website users can’t generate any video at all, as this function is limited to Discord. Midjourney doesn’t allow you to generate full-length clips, limiting them to four seconds.
- Beginners or Casual Users: While Midjourney offers a user-friendly interface, it still requires a certain level of technical proficiency. Beginners or casual users who aren’t experts in AI generation and prompt engineering might find it difficult to navigate smoothly.
- Solopreneurs or Businesses with Limited Budgets: If you’re a solopreneur or a small business with a limited budget, you might want to explore more affordable options or alternatives with a free version.
If you think Midjourney is not the right fit for your business, skip ahead to see my list of the best Midjourney AI alternatives.
Midjourney’s Pricing
Midjourney offers four subscription tiers, with each plan providing different levels of access and features. Users can choose to pay month-to-month or annually for a 20 percent discount. All plans include access to the Midjourney member gallery, the official Discord community, and general and commercial usage terms. While Midjourney doesn’t offer free trials or a free-forever plan, the company occasionally releases limited-time free versions for users to try.
The table below breaks down Midjourney’s monthly and annual plans, including features and limits for each tier. Note that the relaxed generations won’t cost you any Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), while the fast generations try to give you instant access to a GPU. Stealth mode prevents others from viewing your images on the website.
| Basic | Standard | Pro | Mega | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Plan/ Monthly Rate | $96 ($8 per month) | $288 ($24 per month) | $576 ($48 per month) | $1,152 ($96 per month) |
| Monthly Plan Monthly Rate | $10 | $30 | $60 | $120 |
| Relax Generations | ✖ | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Fast Generations | 3.3 hours per month | 15 hours per month | 30 hours per month | 60 hours per month |
| Stealth Image Generation | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Concurrent Fast Jobs | 3 jobs; 10 jobs waiting in queue | 3 jobs; 10 jobs waiting in queue | 12 fast jobs; 3 relaxed jobs; 10 jobs in queue | 12 fast jobs; 3 relaxed jobs; 10 jobs in queue |
6 Key Midjourney AI Features
Midjourney is an innovative image generator that follows prompts as accurately as possible. It allows users to easily produce high-quality outputs, customize generated images, and collaborate with other users.
Text-to-Image Generation
One of Midjourney’s most impressive features is its ability to transform text presentations into stunning visuals. You can simply type a description and generate images that align with your desired output. Midjourney Version 6 lets you use double quotation marks around words or phrases in prompts to signal specific text you want to appear in your images. If you’re having trouble finding the exact word or phrase in your prompt, you can adjust the style settings or use the vary region button to select areas to generate or edit.
When testing Midjourney using the Standard plan, I tried using different modes, including Relax, Fast, and Turbo. Based on my experience, Relax mode took less than three minutes, while Fast mode created images in under a minute. Turbo mode generates images even more quickly and produces more accurate and consistent outputs. Additionally, the Midjourney Bot has been trained to produce images and short clips that favor artistic color, composition, and forms. You can stylize or adjust the parameters to closely match your prompt or make your images more artistic.
Output Quality
Midjourney produces images with exceptional quality, often exceeding the capabilities of its competitors. The images Midjourney creates are detailed, vibrant, and visually appealing, with outputs that depend on the details you include in your prompt and the parameters you set. I tested Midjourney by generating images of people, landscapes, and food, and these pictures showed remarkable clarity, intricate textures, vibrant colors, and depth. Using Discord, I also generated a clip of a leaf in the decaying process, but this clip is limited to four seconds.
Prompt Fidelity
Midjourney is highly responsive to prompts, accurately capturing the intended meaning and style. The platform’s sophisticated AI algorithms, trained on enormous datasets of texts and images, can frequently convert complex and nuanced instructions into accurate outcomes. However, like any AI model, Midjourney isn’t perfect. I tried a range of cues, such as purposefully inputting gibberish or misspelling words, to see how Midjourney might understand them. While Midjourney understands negative prompts, it sometimes makes errors like hit-and-miss.
Midjourney Bot on Discord
The Midjourney bot on Discord lets you create images of anything you can imagine in 60 seconds or less. You can write prompts describing your image using different slash commands, blend images, adjust settings, and generate images using text. Add the Midjourney bot to any Discord server to create images with other subscribers, or make a personal Discord server to organize your work. Note that images generated on private servers are still visible to other website users unless generated in stealth mode.
Midjourney allows you to generate short videos on Discord, unlike in the app. While it’s relatively easy to navigate to Discord once you’re familiar with it, some users might find it bothersome to switch between the website and Discord.
Artistic Styles and Customization
Midjourney offers a wide range of artistic styles and customization options, allowing you to tailor your generated images to your specific needs. Whether you prefer a hyper-realistic image, abstract, or stylized image, Midjourney has something to offer. Its “stylize” parameter influences how strongly this training is applied. Low stylization values produce images that closely match the prompt but are less artistic. Meanwhile, high stylization values create images that are very artistic but less connected to the user’s prompt.
While Midjourney creates intricate and vibrant images even with short single-word prompts, you can create more personalized results by combining concepts like artistic medium, historical periods, location, and more.
Sharing and Collaboration
Midjourney makes it easy to share and collaborate on generated images. Users can easily export creations and share them with others. Midjourney’s Discord community also fosters a collaborative environment where users can share ideas, provide feedback, and learn from each other. However, only one user per registered account may use the services, which can be a disadvantage to teams needing to use a shared plan.
Ease of Use
Midjourney generates images based on user prompts, and it can do so rapidly, which makes it easy to experiment and iterate quickly. It’s also easy to customize through the website, as you can adjust parameters using buttons and sliders. Additionally, you can easily use the previous images you generated as references to new prompts without the need to download and upload them. Midjourney also provides clear instructions and examples for crafting effective prompts to help you communicate your desired image concepts. However, Midjourney can be overwhelming to beginners. Its initial learning curve is steep, and its extensive customizations can be overwhelming. You should also be familiar with Discord’s web interface and become familiar with basic prompt engineering to create more complex and realistic output.
Customer Service
Midjourney’s customer support is primarily provided through its active Discord community. This community-driven approach allows users to receive quick responses to questions or issues from other community members. Midjourney also offers documentation of its step-by-step guides, instructions, and basic prompts to help you use the platform effectively. While Midjourney doesn’t have phone support, users can contact the company through email for billing concerns.
Midjourney Alternatives
Midjourney is a robust image generator, but other platforms might better suit your needs in certain use cases. Three Midjourney alternatives to consider are Jasper AI, Dall-E, Runway, and Stable Diffusion.
Jasper AI
Jasper AI (formerly Jarvis) is a powerful tool designed to make content creation easier for individual creators and businesses. This platform applies generative AI to assist marketers to overcome writer’s block and produce high-quality content for social media posts, blog articles, and sales emails. While Jasper AI is primarily for automating workflows and bulk content, it also offers a text-to-image art generator. Jasper AI offers preset visual styles and mood options, allowing you to navigate through the platform even with little to no prompting experience.
This AI solution starts at $39 per seat and offers a free trial for seven days. However, Jasper AI doesn’t generate videos, which can be used for various marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for a robust AI video generator, consider Runway.
Dall-E
Dall-E is a revolutionary text-to-image technology that outperformed its predecessors in understanding subtle details and nuances. Compared with Midjourney, Dall-E is easier to use, as it’s built natively on ChatGPT, letting you transform your creative visions into stunningly accurate images effortlessly. Unlike earlier systems that often overlooked worlds, Dall-E produces images that precisely match the text prompts. You can ask ChatGPT to suggest ideas, improve your designs, and make changes if you don’t like the generated image. Dall-E protects artists’ rights and allows you to choose if your images can be used to train future AI models.
You can use the platform at no cost to generate up to two images daily with ChatGPT’s free tier. Upgrade to paid plans starting at $20 per month to access more outputs and additional features. While Dall-E generates stunning outputs, its free version is somehow limited. For a better free alternative, look into Stable Diffusion.
Runway
Runway AI is an innovative tool that lets you create high-fidelity content in real-time using an advanced video generation model. You can explore variations to your content, such as changing the location, tweaking the lighting, or recasting a character. You can generate anything from complex physics-based simulations to hyper-realistic renders and use the platform’s production-ready assets. Gen-3 Alpha, Runway’s latest model, represents a significant advancement in fidelity, consistency, and motion compared to its predecessor.
Runway’s paid plans start at $10 per month on an annual subscription, and it also offers a free plan with 125 one-time credits. However, Runway’s customer support could be improved compared to other AI tools. For an AI tool that has responsive support solutions, try Jasper AI.
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is a versatile image generator developed by Stability AI that stands out in accessibility and customization compared with Midjourney. Stable Diffusion provides users with scalability and quality options to suit their creative needs, offering model sizes from 800 million to eight billion parameters. Additionally, it’s an open-source tool and combines a diffusion transformer architecture to produce vibrant, highly detailed, and artistically rich images. It’s available on various platforms, including online and local installations, providing flexibility and control over creative outputs.
It offers a tiered subscription plan and a per-usage pricing model that starts at $20. If you want to create images closer to realism, consider Dall-E.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
You own all the images you generated with Midjourney even after your subscription expires. The images you created can be used commercially with two exceptions. First, if you enlarge an image created by someone else, the upscaled version belongs to the original creator. Additionally, if your company generates over $1 million in annual revenue, you’ll need a Pro or Mega Plan to use Midjourney images commercially for business purposes.
If you want to monetize the AI art you create, subscribe to MIdjourney’s paid plans to access extensive resources and features. Midjourney-generated art can be sold as prints on websites like Etsy or used in merchandise such as phone cases, stickers, shirts, etc. Any good-quality images generated can also be sold on websites where you earn royalties for each purchase a customer makes. If you’ve become skilled at using Midjourney’s advanced features, you can consider creating online courses to teach others.
Subscribers to the Pro and Mega plans can access Midjourney’s stealth mode, which prevents your messages from being visible to others on the website. Users can choose to make private images public at any time on the website by toggling between two modes. On Discord, you can switch by using the commands /stealth or /public. Additionally, if your current plan includes stealth mode, you can opt to publish or unpublish existing images on the site by using the bulk actions from your Archive page or navigating through the options menu for an individual image view.
How I Tested and Evaluated Midjourney
I tested Midjourney by experimenting with prompts and images using the website and Midjourney bot on Discord. I explored its user interface and experience, immersing myself in the process of image generation using different prompts, blending images, and creating short videos. In assessing Midjourny, I identified six key categories essential for creators and for businesses needing a robust image generation platform. I also divided each category into weighted subcategories and assigned an overall score out of five to see how Midjourney performed across six categories.
Evaluation Criteria
I put the highest emphasis on core features and output quality to help users find a robust image-generation tool. I also considered its pricing and customization, followed by ease of use and customer support.
- Core Features (25 Percent): A powerful image generation tool should include standard features such as text generation, image-to-image conversion, high-speed renders, concurrent jobs, and more.
- Output Quality (15 Percent): Here, I assessed the quality of generated images and videos, as well as the generation time for each mode (relax, fast, and turbo).
- Cost (15 Percent): An image generation tool’s pricing should suit your budget and resources. For this category, I looked into Midjourney’s monthly and annual pricing plans.
- Customization and Integrations (15 Percent): I evaluated how flexible the platform is in terms of style, parameters, objects, and scenes, as well as the availability of API integration.
- Ease of Use (10 Percent): I tested the platform to understand its interface and user experience. I also browsed through its documentation and knowledge base to see if it has enough resources for its users to get started with the platform.
- Customer Support (10 Percent): For this category, I looked into Midjourney’s support solutions through various channels, onboarding and training, and active user community.
Bottom Line: Midjourney Review
Midjourney AI is a powerful and versatile tool that continuously revolutionizes the field of image generation and artificial intelligence. It can create vibrant, hyper-realistic, and highly detailed visuals from text prompts. Midjourney excels for its text generation, customization, extensive artistic styles, and active user community. However, it has limitations, such as occasional wonky outputs and potential for bias, as well as its lack of a free forever plan. Before deciding if Midjourney is the best tool for you, test the software using its entry-level tier and seek advice from an active user or experts to have a more in-depth understanding of the tool.
Are you interested in exploring other AI art generators? See our rundown of the best AI art generators for beginners and pros.
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