Top 5 Free AI Image Generators You Should Try

TL:DR

• Ideogram: A social AI image generator offering limited daily prompts but delivering impressive quality.

• NightCafe: Features creative options and custom model training, with limited free daily credits.

• Runway AI: An advanced suite designed for creative professionals, featuring a complex interface and limited free credits.

• DeepAI: Provides a basic interface with unlimited image generation, although HD options require an account and an affordable paid plan.

• Microsoft Designer: Offers a simple interface with guided prompts and is completely free to use.

The use of AI image generators is rapidly increasing as both professionals and creatives look for new sources of inspiration and efficient methods for producing high-quality content for various purposes.

From website imagery to social media posts, AI-generated images are becoming mainstream. With more generators entering the market, it's becoming a cost-effective tool for enhancing creative tasks, complementing social media presence, and boosting marketing efforts for businesses.

We've reviewed the five best free AI image generators currently available. Each has unique features and serves different purposes, but they all offer free plans, making them accessible to anyone looking to incorporate AI image generation into their daily workflow.

To demonstrate their capabilities, quality, and accuracy, we used the following prompt on all platforms:

"A black cat with white paws sitting next to Buckingham Palace in London on a sunny summer’s day. There are people walking by in the background, and a red London double-decker bus and traditional black taxi are driving by."

Ideogram:

Ideogram offers up to 25 free prompts per day, but users are placed in the "slow queue" and all generated images are publicly viewable by other Ideogram members. Essentially, it functions like a social media network for AI image generation, with a homepage feed showcasing publicly generated images that you can 'love' similar to Instagram.

Each prompt generates four different image iterations and provides a 'magic' prompt—an enhanced, more detailed example that can inspire future prompts.

The quality of the images is highly impressive, although it sometimes struggles with human faces, especially when prompts lack detailed descriptions. It excels at generating a wide range of images, including real-life, 3D, cartoon, and CGI styles.

Paid features include more daily prompts, faster image generation, and the ability to make images private. However, if you don't need more than 25 prompts a day, the free version is perfectly adequate.

NightCafe:

NightCafe offers a range of free features designed to unleash your creativity. The free plan uses the SDXL 1.0 model and includes five free prompts for Dall-E 3 and Stable Video Diffusion.

A standout feature of NightCafe is the ability to train a model to generate images of your own face, a specific object, or a particular art style. However, this is limited to two free fine-tunes before requiring the purchase of credits for continued training.

Before entering your prompt, you can choose from a vast array of style presets based on your image needs. Options include ‘Striking,’ Anime, Color Painting, CGI, Dark Fantasy, Hyperreal, Epic Origami, Modern Comic, Photo, Oil Painting, and many more.

Users receive five free credits per day, with each credit equating to one image generation, rather than one prompt. You can specify how many images to generate per prompt, so it's important to manage your credits wisely. The generated images are accurate, detailed, and realistic.

For those needing more, additional credits can be purchased, with 100 credits priced at $5.99 per month.

Runway AI:

Runway AI is more than just a text-to-image generator; it's a comprehensive AI creative suite offering tools for text-to-video, video-to-video, and generative audio.

The text-to-image tool is ideal for those seeking greater control and creativity over their visuals. You can remix the style and composition, and all generated images are in high resolution.

The user interface is quite complex and requires specific creation methods and some coding knowledge, making it best suited for advanced or skilled users like designers, illustrators, and artists.

While the platform is free to use, the free version is limited to 510 credits, which allows for just over 100 image generations (each generation costs five credits). Each generation allows for editing style, resolution, and image ratio.

For those needing more, the cheapest plan costs $15 monthly for 625 credits and access to additional advanced features.

DeepAI:

DeepAI is a free AI image generator that allows users to create unlimited images in a variety of styles.

The interface is straightforward, generating one image per prompt, making it an excellent choice for enthusiasts or creative freelancers seeking a cost-effective way to produce images.

While it's not the fastest generator and only produces one image at a time, requiring several prompts to achieve the desired result, the overall quality, accuracy, and capabilities are impressive. Generating images in HD requires creating an account, but the difference in quality is significant.

You can experiment with different style presets and image enhancements to achieve the best results.

For those needing more, DeepAI offers a paid plan at $4.99 a month, or a pay-as-you-go option at $5 per additional use of a premium feature.

Microsoft Designer:

Powered by Dall-E, Microsoft's image generator is completely free and accessible through Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) or directly on its website.

Microsoft Designer boasts a simple user interface and minimal features (no editing options, for instance). However, it guides you in crafting the perfect prompt by suggesting the use of adjectives, nouns, verbs, and styles—the style being crucial for the final outcome.

This tool is excellent for creatives, designers, artists, social media professionals, and anyone curious to explore AI capabilities.

There are no paid plans; it's entirely free to use with a Microsoft account login.

The bottom line:

When it comes to choosing a favorite, Microsoft Designer stands out for its accuracy and quality. It flawlessly captured all the details of my prompt.

While the other tools also produced high-quality images, most missed key elements from the prompt, such as the cat's white paws, the black taxi, or the red double-decker bus. Their accuracy wasn’t quite on par.

Ideogram came closest to Microsoft Designer in terms of accuracy, but its quality was slightly lower, and it has daily limitations that Microsoft’s image generator does not.