Midjourney remains a benchmark for AI image quality, but the $10/month subscription puts it out of reach for casual creators and beginners. The good news: the gap has closed significantly over the past year.
Here are the free tools worth your time in 2026.
Ideogram 2.0 handles text inside images better than any other free tool right now. If you need posters, thumbnails, or social graphics with readable text, start here. The free tier gives you around 10-25 high-quality generations per day.
Leonardo AI offers 150 free tokens daily and access to multiple trained models. The Phoenix model in particular produces results that hold up against Midjourney v6 for portrait and concept art work.
FLUX.1 (via Hugging Face Spaces) is open-source and generates high-resolution images with no daily limit, though queue times vary. It excels at photorealistic output.
Bing Image Creator (DALL-E 3 underneath) is still the easiest entry point: no account required for basic use, fast generation, and solid results for everyday prompts.
The main trade-off across all free tiers is consistency. Midjourney's community and prompt ecosystem are hard to replicate. But for solo projects, social content, or prototyping visuals, these four cover most use cases without spending a cent.
For a full Dutch-language breakdown, see this comparison on AI Tools NL.
