I got tired of reading comparisons written by people who clearly tested each tool once with the prompt "a cat wearing a hat." So I did something more rigorous: I ran the same 50 prompts through Midjourney v6, DALL-E 3 (via ChatGPT), and Stable Diffusion XL, generating roughly 500 images total. The prompts ranged from "product photo of a coffee mug on a marble counter" to "oil painting of a storm over the Pacific Ocean" to "infographic showing quarterly revenue growth."
The results were less clear-cut than the internet would have you believe.
Midjourney: the one that makes everything look expensive
Midjourney has a house style, and that style is "cinematic and slightly too beautiful." Hand it any prompt and the output looks like it belongs in a magazine spread. This is both its greatest strength and its most annoying limitation.
For marketing visuals, social media content, and concept art, nothing touches it. I gave it "modern coworking space with natural light" and got an image that could sell a WeWork membership. The lighting, composition, and color grading are consistently excellent with minimal prompt engineering.
Where it falls apart: anything requiring precision. Product mockups with specific text, technical diagrams, images that need to match an exact brand style. Midjourney interprets your prompt through its own aesthetic lens, and you can't fully override that. It also still runs primarily through Discord, which is a bizarre user experience for a tool this popular. The web app exists but feels like an afterthought.
Pricing starts at $10/month for about 200 images. No free tier. For the quality you get, it's a fair deal.
DALL-E 3: the one that listens
DALL-E 3's integration with ChatGPT is its killer feature. You don't write prompts — you have a conversation. "Make the background darker." "Move the text to the left." "Make it look more like a watercolor." This iterative workflow is something neither Midjourney nor Stable Diffusion can match.
The other standout: text rendering. DALL-E 3 is the only major model that can reliably put readable text inside images. If you need a social media graphic with a headline, a mockup with a product name, or a meme with legible captions, DALL-E is the only game in town.
The downside is aesthetic range. DALL-E images have a certain "clean digital illustration" look that's hard to escape. They're good, but they rarely have the visual punch of Midjourney's output. The content policy is also stricter — it refuses prompts that Midjourney handles without complaint.
Included with ChatGPT Plus at $20/month. Limited free generations on the free tier. If you're already paying for ChatGPT, DALL-E is essentially free.
Stable Diffusion: the one for control freaks
Stable Diffusion is open-source, which means two things: it's free to run on your own hardware, and the ecosystem of custom models is enormous. There are fine-tuned models for anime, photorealism, architecture, fashion, product photography — you name it. If you need a very specific style, someone has probably already trained a model for it.
The trade-off is complexity. Getting good results from Stable Diffusion requires understanding concepts like CFG scale, sampling methods, negative prompts, and LoRA weights. The learning curve is steep. I spent my first three hours just getting the software installed and configured.
But once you're past that curve, the control is unmatched. Inpainting, outpainting, ControlNet for pose matching, img2img for style transfer — these are capabilities that Midjourney and DALL-E simply don't offer. For professional workflows where you need pixel-level control, Stable Diffusion is the only serious option.
Free to run locally if you have a decent GPU (8GB+ VRAM). Cloud services like RunDiffusion start at $0.50/hour.
The verdict, without hedging
If you're a marketer, content creator, or anyone who needs beautiful images fast: Midjourney. The quality-to-effort ratio is unbeatable.
If you need text in images, iterative refinement, or you're already on ChatGPT: DALL-E 3. The conversational workflow is genuinely better for most people.
If you're technical, need custom styles, or want to run things locally: Stable Diffusion. Nothing else gives you this level of control.
Most professionals I know use two of the three. Midjourney for the hero images, DALL-E for the quick stuff, and Stable Diffusion when they need something specific. There's no reason to pick just one.
Explore all AI image generation tools in our Image Generation directory.