Midjourney

The image generator many people picture first, sold by subscription and run entirely on its servers.

Benchmark review. Giants are reviewed rarely, to show what the tools in the directory are measured against. This one is not listed in the directory, and it is an example, not a recommendation. Scores are our opinion on the six questions, based on public sources and dated October 2026.

Midjourney makes some of the most admired pictures in the category, so Delivery is a 4. It is also a service you rent. Its own help pages would not load for this review, so the details here come from a third-party pricing guide dated October 2026 and are worth checking: generating requires a paid plan, from about $10 a month, there is no free trial on the website or in Discord, and the private Stealth mode is reserved for the Pro and Mega plans, so images made on cheaper plans are public.

The same guide says Midjourney's terms, effective May 2026, give the company a perpetual licence to reproduce and distribute your prompts and the images you make, and that you can keep using what you create after you cancel. The company is also being sued: Disney and Universal filed a copyright case against it in June 2025, and we have not checked how it stands now. We list it as a yardstick for the open tools and do not recommend it.

What stands out

• Generating needs a paid plan, with no free trial on the website or in Discord
• Private Stealth mode only on the Pro and Mega plans, so cheaper plans are public
• Sued by Disney and Universal over copyright in June 2025

Side by side. AI Horde vs Midjourney