The 6 best AI image generators in 2026

AI image generators have been brewing (generating?) up a storm for the last few years. If you’ve been on social media, watched prime time news shows, or ordered from GrubHub, AI-generated images have been impossible to miss. These kinds of AI-generated images are everywhere, and sometimes you won’t even realize. If you want to join in the fun, or add some AI-powered features to your business workflows, the apps on this list will give you what you’re looking for.

I’ve been writing about AI image generators since Google Deep Dream in 2015. That’s about as long as anyone outside of a computer science lab has realistically been thinking about these tools, and I’m really excited by how far they’ve come.

I’m going to try to avoid the thorny discussions around artistic merit, whether or not these tools are replacing or augmenting artists, and copyright infringement in training data, at least where I can. I’m also going to steer clear of some of the controversial uses these models have been put to. You’re reading this on the Zapier blog, so I’m going to assume you have a good personal or professional need for an image generator.

While you’ve probably tested these image generators before, if you haven’t tried one in a while, it’s worth taking a few hours to play around with one of the newer text-to-image AI apps. Things have improved massively, so it’s worth understanding what they can do, even just from a technical perspective. Whether you like it or not, we’re all seeing a lot of their output at the moment. And there will only be more to come.

The best AI image generators

• ChatGPT for the best AI image generator overall

• Nano Banana for Google users

• Midjourney for artistic results

• Adobe Firefly for integrating AI-generated images into photos

• Recraft for graphic design

• Muse Image for availability everywhere

How do AI image generators work?

All these AI image generators take a text prompt and then turn it—as best they can—into a matching image. This opens up some wild possibilities, since your prompt can be anything from “an impressionist oil painting of a Canadian man riding a moose through a forest of maple trees” to “a painting in the style of Vermeer of a large fluffy Irish wolfhound enjoying a pint of beer in a traditional pub” or “a photograph of a donkey on the moon.”

Seriously, the only real limits are your imagination, the AI image generator’s ability to comprehend your prompt, and any content filters put in place to stop plagiarism, copyright infringement, and bad actors flooding the internet with AI-generated violence or other NSFW content. The best AI image generators can even create accurate text now, something they struggled with for years, so you can generate things like logos and posters from a single prompt.

Most AI image generators work in a pretty similar way. Billions of image-text pairs are used to train a neural network (basically, a very fancy computer algorithm modeled loosely on the human brain) on what things are. By allowing it to process near-countless images, it learns what dogs, the color red, Vermeers, and everything else are. Once this is done, you have an AI that can interpret almost any prompt—though there is a skill in setting things up so it can do so accurately.

The next step is to actually render the AI-generated image. There are two primary ways of doing this:

• Diffusion models work by starting with a random field of noise, and then editing it in a series of steps to match its understanding of the prompt.

• Autoregression models work by generating chunks of the image at a time, predicting the next chunk based on what they’ve already created.

What makes the best AI image generator?

There’s a reason that AI image generators have become incredibly popular over the past three or four years: before that, they were pretty bad. The technology underlying them was incredibly cool and impressive, at least to research scientists, but the images they could output were underwhelming. Even the original DALL·E was more of a fun novelty than a world-shaking revelation when it launched in 2021.

Now that these text-to-image generators have been around for a while, there’s some real competition between the different models. They’ve really increased in quality and can now generate text reliably, follow detailed instructions, and create complex designs. If all you care about is the current “best” model, check out Artificial Analysis’s current leaderboard. But we’ve reached the stage where the top 50 to 100 models are all excellent, so other features and usability matter more than they used to.

So, to find the best AI art generators, I set some pretty strict criteria:

• I was looking for apps that allowed you to generate AI images from a text prompt (and to a lesser degree, an image prompt). Tools that create AI-generated portraits or characters, colorize black and white photos, or turn photos into videos are all interesting but out of scope.

• I was looking for AI image generators that have their own model and app, and don’t just provide access to the same set of open-source and API-based models. This is harder than it used to be as many platforms now support a range of different models on top of their own, especially as the quality of the app surrounding the models is increasingly the differentiating factor. Where an app provided multiple models, its own model had to be right up there.

Aside from all that, I also considered how easy each AI image creator is to use, what kinds of controls and customization options it provides (for things like AI image upscale), what pricing model it has, and most important of all: how good were the results? The best AI image generators are now far less likely to create weird or impossible-looking things.

I’ve been using and writing about text-to-image generators since the original DALL·E launched, and about photography and art for more than a decade, so I’m pretty familiar with how all these tools work—and their various pros, cons, and bonkers behaviors. Most top image models will now give you a usable result from the same prompt. So how easy the app makes it to get really good results and how much control you have to make changes to generated images matter more and more.

The best AI image generators at a glance

The best AI image generator overall

ChatGPT

ChatGPT pros:

• Incredibly easy to use and a best-in-class model

• Included with ChatGPT plans, so you get a lot of AI for your money

• Integrates with Zapier

ChatGPT cons:

• Only generates a single option by default

• It’s pricey if you don’t want the rest of ChatGPT with it

After OpenAI’s DALL·E model kick-started the text-to-image boom, it seemed to take a backseat to the company’s language models. DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3 were good when they debuted but were both quickly overtaken by other models. But over the last year or so, OpenAI has been back with a bang.

GPT Image 2.5, which is integrated with ChatGPT, is one of the best image generators available. It’s also ridiculously easy to use: tell ChatGPT what you want to see, and it’ll create the image. Unfortunately, because it uses an autoregression model instead of diffusion, it’s a bit slower than the other image generators on this list—and it only generates a single image. If you’re only occasionally generating a few images, this isn’t a big deal, but it’s worth noting.

It’s really solid across the board: accurate text rendering, great editing, understanding of numbers and position, the list goes on. Its best feature keeps changing because it’s so good. Right now, it’s the best-in-class editing: you can mark up the image with comments and directions, and ChatGPT will make the requested changes. I found it incredibly reliable in my testing. In the screenshot above, I asked ChatGPT to enlarge the Earth and add a fishbowl-style helmet to the image I’d generated earlier. ChatGPT reasoned that the fishbowl needed to enclose the nose and ears and rejected an earlier version where it didn’t. You can judge the results for yourself.

You get limited access to image creation on ChatGPT’s free plan. If you want to use it more, you’ll need to subscribe to ChatGPT Go, Plus, or Pro. Some of the features, like thinking in image creation, are limited to the more expensive paid plans.

You can connect ChatGPT to Zapier to do things like automatically creating images from Google Forms or HubSpot responses—or any other apps you use. You can also securely access and take action in all your apps straight from ChatGPT, so you could send an image you’d just generated straight to Slack and add it to your editorial calendar, all without leaving the chat window. Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT.

ChatGPT pricing: Free users get limited image generation. ChatGPT Go users ($8/month) get more image generation, while ChatGPT Plus users ($20/month) get yet more and ChatGPT Pro users ($100/month) get unlimited access.

The best AI image generator for Google users

Nano Banana

Nano Banana pros:

• Excellent at editing existing images

• Available through Google Gemini as well as other apps and tools

Nano Banana cons:

• Editing isn’t as customizable as ChatGPT

Nano Banana in Gemini is Google’s answer to ChatGPT’s image generation. Despite the silly name, Nano Banana is a serious contender. We’re currently on version 2.1, and it’s especially good at incorporating existing images. If you’re a Google user, using it through Gemini is a very easy choice.

Google has been consistently improving Nano Banana. While it could always generate incredible results, earlier models didn’t always adhere closely to your prompt. I didn’t have the same issue with the latest version. Similarly, the once ever-present watermark is now a toggle—though there’s an invisible SynthID watermark that’s also in ChatGPT-generated images.

The one area it still lags behind is editing. It’s ok at taking chat prompts and running with them, but without the direct editing and annotation tools available in other apps, it’s harder to make small, specific changes to the images you generate. Hopefully Google will continue to improve it.

You can even add Nano Banana to the rest of your AI workflows with Zapier’s Gemini integration, so you can create images in Gemini based on triggers in all your other apps.

Nano Banana pricing: Limited availability on free plan; included with Google AI Plus plan at $4.99/month and Google AI Pro plan at $19.99/month.

The best AI image generator for artistic results

Midjourney

Midjourney pros:

• Consistently produces some of the best-looking AI-generated images

• The community is a great way to get inspiration

Midjourney cons:

• Images you generate are public by default

• Free trials are currently suspended

For a long time, Midjourney produced my favorite results of all of the image generators on this list. Other apps have surpassed it in quality, especially when it comes to adhering exactly to your prompts and editing, but I still feel Midjourney produces some of the most visually appealing and interesting results with great textures and colors, as well as the kinds of creative controls other apps don’t offer. It helps that you can fine-tune the model to match your visual preferences.

Still, as you can probably guess, Midjourney isn’t totally free of quirks: by default, every image you generate is posted publicly on Midjourney’s Explore page and can be viewed on your profile. It gives everything a cool community aspect, but it means that anyone who cares to look can see what you’re creating. While not necessarily a problem for artists, this might be a dealbreaker if you’re looking to use Midjourney for business purposes. It’s also worth noting that Midjourney is in the midst of a lawsuit with Disney and Universal; not much has come of it yet, and a lot of these suits have petered out, but it’s worth being aware of.

Midjourney’s help docs are really good and walk you through getting started with both the web app and Discord, and they show you how to control all its various features, from selecting model versions and upscaling to using reference images and its personalization tools. It’s one of the most feature-filled apps on this list, and once you understand the different options and are prepared to work through the different tools, the results you can get are amazing.

In terms of raw quality, Midjourney is hard to compare. It doesn’t have an API so isn’t listed in Artificial Analysis’s leaderboard anymore. If I had to call it, I’d say it’s still a solid contender for image generation, but its complex prompt adherence, editing controls, and text generation are no longer state-of-the-art. Its other tools can make up for that, but it’s no longer as easy to recommend as it once was.

Midjourney’s free trials are still suspended, but they’re occasionally reinstated for a few days. If you miss a free trial window, the Basic Plan starts at $10/month and comes with 3.3 hours of GPU time per month, or around 200 images. You also get the option to buy additional GPU time, and you can use your images commercially.

Midjourney pricing: From $10/month for the Basic Plan that allows you to generate ~200 images/month and provides commercial usage rights.

Read more: Midjourney vs. ChatGPT

Best AI image generator for integrating AI-generated images into photos

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly pros:

• Integrates well with Adobe’s apps, especially Photoshop

• Powerful when it’s matching an image

Adobe Firefly cons:

• Not the best as a pure text-to-image model

Adobe has been building AI tools into its apps for almost two decades, so it should be no surprise that it has one of the most powerful text-to-image generators—at least in terms of how it integrates with other tools. You can try out its AI model, Firefly, on the web for free or through Adobe Express, but it’s at its best in the latest version of Photoshop. (Photoshop also supports other models now, including Nano Banana and GPT Image, and they’re probably better than Firefly.)

The big thing is that Photoshop is now an AI app. You can have Firefly (or one of the other models) edit your images based on your prompts. You can also mark up the image with specific AI requests, and use the powerful fill, remove, crop and expand, and upscale tools. Of course, Photoshop as you know and love still exists: It’s just been rebranded as the “Pro Editor.” You can use it to make any fine adjustments, and it still has access to a lot of the AI tools.

As much as other tools started the conversation about image-generating AIs, Adobe’s Firefly was the first implementation of an AI photo generator that didn’t feel like a party trick but a tool. Other apps are now doing similar things, but Firefly is unique in that it’s available to the millions of professionals who use Adobe apps every day.

Firefly pricing: Limited free daily generations; from $9.99/month for Firefly Standard, which includes unlimited Firefly image generations; Photoshop is available from $19.99/month as part of the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which comes with 1,000 generative credits per month.

The best AI image generator for graphic design

Recraft

Recraft pros:

• One of the most powerful and usable AI image generators

• Graphic design features are second to none

Recraft cons:

• More complicated to use than some of the other apps

Recraft is probably the most impressive app on this list. Its model is excellent and able to generate whatever you want, from photorealistic images to interesting logo designs. But it’s the tools that Recraft has built around its model that really make it stand out.

Here’s one example. Recraft allows you to create image sets that all fit the same style and color panel from a single set of prompts. You have all the style, color, and controls you need to dial things in, and it does an exceptional job right off the bat. Once you’re happy with your images, you can export them as JPGs (fine), PNGs (better), or SVGs (amazing). Instead of being limited to small individual images, right from Recraft, you can create matching scalable design elements.

On top of that, you can use Recraft to create product mockups that combine multiple AI elements, in-paint and out-paint to add elements and combine images, adjust images and AI-generated work, remove backgrounds, and so much more. It’s got collaboration tools, a great workspace, and you can export your work to other apps like Photoshop or Illustrator. It’s a real continuation of what Adobe has done integrating Firefly into Photoshop, and it’s also adding additional third-party models.

Recraft Pricing: Limited free plan. From $12/month ($10/month when billed annually) for Basic with 1,000 credits/month, commercial rights, and more artistic controls.

The best AI image generator that’s everywhere

Muse Image

Meta AI Pros:

• A solid, free AI image generator that you probably already have access to

• Built into Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp

Meta AI cons:

• Not as good as ChatGPT for text and editing

Meta has been in and out of the lead on AI model development, but right now, they’re in. Meta’s Muse Image is an excellent chat-based image generator available through Meta AI, WhatsApp, Facebook, and lots of other places. The big appeal is that it’s just there alongside your messages; if you need to turn a photo of one of your friends into a quick meme, it’s a tap away.

Editing is surprisingly good with Muse Image. You can mark up your image, describe changes, and generally steer it to make the image you want. It still can make a few mistakes, and its text accuracy wasn’t as good as ChatGPT’s in my testing, but all in all, it’s really solid for a free tool built into your go-to social apps.

Meta has recently launched Meta One, a subscription service that includes more AI usage and social features.

Meta AI Pricing: Free through Meta AI and on Meta platforms; more usage through Meta One from $7.99/month.

Other AI image generators worth trying out

Over the past year, the overall standard of image generators has really improved. There are now a dozen different models that are almost equivalent in quality. I feel the six above are the best choices for most people, but there are a handful of other apps that warrant mentioning:

• Leonardo.Ai. In addition to offering FLUX, image creation tool Leonardo.Ai (now owned by Canva) has developed its own Lucid Origin and Phoenix models. It’s a solid platform that’s aimed at businesses and creators. (Full disclosure: I’ve worked with them in the past, but I’d recommend it regardless. It only doesn’t make the list because it puts so much emphasis on other models.)

• Generative AI by Getty. Designed to generate commercially safe images, Generative AI by Getty is…fine. If you need images with zero commercial risk, it’s worth a look—but the legal system doesn’t seem to care about companies using images from other platforms at this point.

• Luma has pivoted to “creative agents,” which are a bit out of scope here, though its UNI-1 model still scores highly on benchmarks.

• There are a number of excellent models from Chinese AI companies, including ByteDance’s Seedream and Alibaba’s Qwen. I found the apps around them were generally not as good as the apps above. You can also use these models through their API and AI art generators.

• Grok. Grok has a good but very controversial image generator. The issues around its use keep it off the list.

• Black Forest Labs’ FLUX is still a great series of models, but they’re mostly for developers using the API (though you can find them in other apps). Crucially, they are no longer uniquely good and open.

• Reve was one of my favorite tools in the last update. It’s since been shut down in what looks like an acquihire by OpenAI.

• Ideogram lags behind the frontier at the moment. Its app is still good, but the images it generates just didn’t compete with ChatGPT and Gemini in my testing.

• Krea is a creative platform with its own model. I liked it, but it felt a bit out of scope.

• Microsoft Bing Image Creator now uses MAI Image, Microsoft’s own in-house model. The model itself is great, but Bing is not exactly a joy to use.

If you want a laundry list of every AI image generator out there, including those that are built on top of all the models I’ve talked about, I made that too. It includes more than two dozen image generators: some are built into other tools, like AI writing apps, photo editing apps, or stock photo sites; some let you select from multiple models; and each one differs on how it approaches AI image generation. So if none of the apps on this list feel natural to you, check out my list of the top AI art generators, and see if anything stands out.

How to use an AI image generator

Ok, so you know what the best options are, but…now what? The team at Zapier has put together a bunch of resources to help you understand how to use these tools—and put them to work.

First, a guide for how to write effective AI art prompts, so you can get what you’re looking for faster (and better) when generating images.

Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to use these tools for more than just creating wacky pictures. Here are some tips for how to use AI image generators at work.

And finally, you can automate your AI image generators, so they do their magic behind the scenes and connect to all the other apps you use.

The legal and ethical implications of AI-generated images

AI-generated images are everywhere now, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking questions about how they should (or shouldn’t) be used.

There aren’t clear laws in place surrounding AI-generated images. And that goes for both sides of the coin: the U.S. Copyright Office suggests that AI-generated content isn’t copyright-protected without some kind of significant human input to the process, and there aren’t rules to protect artists whose work was scraped for AI training. They’ve reaffirmed this stance, and the courts have sided with their interpretation.

You’re not likely to get into trouble for using AI-generated images for a few social media posts or blog hero images, but because there’s no line drawn in the sand yet, it can be risky to develop an entire strategy around AI-generated art. The results of the Midjourney vs. Disney, Warner Brothers, and Universal case could be enlightening, but it may not affect regular users regardless of how it falls out. (For what it’s worth, Hollywood and Netflix seem to already be using AI image generators all the time.)

Then there’s the issue of bias. As of now, AI has a lot of the same biases as humans, and that can lead to everything from the portrayal of stereotypes to harmful content. I experienced this myself with the outputs I got from some of the apps while testing them, though other tools take deliberate steps to add diversity to the images they generate. It’s up to us as humans to avoid it by reviewing AI-generated content for bias and refining our prompts to eliminate that bias as much as possible.

What’s next for AI image generators?

AI image generating is a rapidly evolving space—and more powerful models are available each time I update this article. (I’ve had to update this article six times over the past two years.) It’s wild how good text-to-image models like GPT Image 2.5, Nano Banana 2.1, and all the others are getting at rendering tricky concepts repeatedly. There’s still a gap at the top of the table, but across the board, image models are wildly more usable than ever before.

Related reading:

• The best AI productivity tools

• The best AI-powered social media management platforms

• The best AI photo editors

• The best photo editors for iPhone and Android

• The best free AI tools

• What is an AI watermark, and what does it actually prove?

This article was originally published in March 2023. The most recent update was in October 2026.