16 Best AI Image Generator Apps For Creators (Free & Paid)

By Jeff Cobb.  Last Updated on February 18, 2024

Want to learn about some of the top generative AI tools for solving various content creation challenges? If you don’t have time to read the full list, here are some of our top picks for different AI tools by category.

Most Detailed And High-Quality
Midjourney logo

Midjourney

Creates professional, photorealistic images from text prompts

Most Accurate
DALL.E3 logo

DALL.E3

Consistently creates images that accurately follow your text prompt

Best Free
Stable Diffusion logo

Stable Diffusion

 A free open-source AI image creator trained on large datasets

Best Workflow App
Jasper logo

Jasper

Jasper Art, part of the Jasper AI tool suite, is a leader in the AI market

Best for Professionals
Adobe Firefly logo

Adobe Firefly

Accurately creates a diverse range of visuals from simple text prompts

How We Evaluate and Test Tools & Platforms

Reviews of tools and platforms on the Learning Revolution site are overseen by the site’s founder, Jeff Cobb, an e-learning industry expert with more than 20 years of experience working with online course platforms. All evaluations are conducted by a team of analysts who have extensive experience using, testing, and writing about these types of platforms. We dedicate numerous hours to researching each platform, ensuring each aligns with the needs of online course sellers, and vetting specific areas like core features, usability, pricing, and customer satisfaction. Our reviews are unbiased, and while we will participate in affiliate programs, if available, we do not accept payment for placement in our articles or links to external websites.

Keep reading to see our full list of AI image generator recommendations for creators, both free and paid.

Best AI Image Generator Apps For Creators

Did you know 90% of information transmitted to our brains is through visuals?

To make your blog posts, online courses, digital products, or any other content more engaging, you must add relevant and high-quality visuals to the mix.

Thanks to generative AI technology, you can now create realistic images of yourself, your products, or any other object you want. In addition to image generating apps, you can also find AI video generators and editors for creators.

Also, just like you can create realistic images, there is also ways to humanize your AI content which essentially means to transform an AI text draft into compelling human-like content.

Instead, we’ll discuss ways to transform an AI text draft into compelling human-like content.

No need to spend thousands of dollars on photography or hire expensive designers to create unique visuals. You can generate any image you want using online AI image generator apps.

However, generative AI tools work differently based on their training data, technology engine, and algorithms. You might want to also find the

So, in this article, we’ll share some of the world’s best free and paid AI image-generation apps designed and help you choose the most suitable ones for your business.

Let’s dive in.

The Best Free Online AI Image Creators From Text

AI image generators rely on your text instructions to understand your requirements. So, you must describe your desired image in as much detail as possible to get accurate results.

Let’s first check out some of the best free AI image creators. Most of these tools come with usage and performance limits. But they can produce stunningly accurate images for your content.

Free AI Image Creator #1: DALL.E2

DallE2 homepage with black background and DALLE2 in wh ite

DALL.E2 was one of the first publicly available AI image generators by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It is a text-to-image generator capable of creating realistic AI images based on the user’s text commands.

OpenAI has since launched newer and more advanced versions of DALL.E2, it is still an excellent free AI image tool for your online courses, digital products, and social media posts.

Here’s a set of images created with DALL.E2

4 images of a samoyed dog hugging a white cat

Notice the text description we used to tell DALL.E2 what we wanted. Its results rely almost entirely on your input description.

If you’re unsatisfied with an image result, add more detail to its text description or regenerate the image.

Your command doesn’t always have to be a well-written sentence. For example, you can add specific keywords of the traits you want to see in an image, like smile, white, rain, etc., separated by commas.

It learns from your feedback, adjusts, and regenerates better-quality results.

Free AI Image Creator #2: Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion homepage screenshot
Get started for free button
Search Prompt button

If you want to create realistic AI images of humans, animals, and other living creatures, Stable Diffusion is among the best tools to do it.

It is a free open-source AI image creator trained on mammoth datasets, including images with text descriptions, videos, and other critical real-world information.

This allows it to create a variety of images that are hard to differentiate from reality.

Here’s an example.

Person on a spaceship standing at a table with a drink, burger and fries in front of him

Stable Diffusion gives you more control over your image creation process by accepting detailed keyword-based prompts, negative keywords to avoid things you do not want to include in an image, and several other filters to create accurate results.

Stable Diffusion WebUI screen
with prompt and generate button

It uses an iterative approach to image creation, which means it uses your feedback to gradually remove noise from the images and make them more accurate.

Although it is a slow and resource-heavy tool, it’s still one of the best image generators for content creators.

Free AI Image Creator #3: Perchance 

Perchance is among the most impressive free AI image generators on this list. It uses Stable Diffusion for image creation but provides users easy-to-use filters and commands to generate photorealistic images.

AI Image generator where you put in a description and pick an art style

It has a simple user interface where you can describe your image in a text box and choose its style, orientation, and number of results.

The Art Style dropdown provides a long list of options, helping you explore different types of images. In addition, you can choose different image genres like horror or thriller, set color tone, and mention any specific image exposure type.

Here’s an example image created with Perchance.

baseball player on a field

Want to see its versatility? We created the same image (a baseball player) in Anime style.

Here’s the result.

Anime female baseball player swinging at a ball

With so much control over your images, you can create precisely the kind of art you want for your blog posts, online courses, or digital products.

So, if you’re an artist, an educator, a digital product seller, or a YouTube content creator, make Perchance your best friend for AI image generation.

Free AI Image Creator #4: Koala 

Koala homepage with Try KoalaWriter for Free button and a View Pricing

Koala is among the top AI content-writing tools in the world. But it also has a very impressive free image generator.

Like most other tools in this article, Koala is a text-to-image tool that relies on your written commands to create images. Using the Stable Fusion AI technology it can produce some stunning results.

For example, here’s what it created against the command “a smiling child outdoors”

image of a child smiling outdoors

Although you can create any kind of image with Koala, its core strength is generating stock images for blog posts, presentations, and other forms of online content.

As a free tool, it can drastically reduce your costs in acquiring stock photography and help you generate precise visuals.

Free AI Image Creator #5: Canva

Canva Magic Media screen
where you describe a scene to generate a few seconds of video

You’ve probably heard of Canva, one of the top online graphic design tools. It recently added several AI tools, including an AI image generator.

Canva’s AI image generator resides in its designer interface, where you can enter text prompts to generate images.

Canva AI uses Stable Diffusion for image creation and offers several additional filters and settings to help you fine-tune your image prompts.

As a result, creating stunningly beautiful AI images with Canva takes just a few clicks.

For example, we created an image using the prompt “Michael Jackson singing in a concert”. We chose “Flimsy” as our image style in landscape mode.

Ai generated image of michael jackson singing in Canva

Amazing results, right?

You can regenerate images if you don’t like them or fine-tune your prompts to get better results. The advantage of using Canva for AI image generation is that you can take these images straight into your Canva editor, add your text annotations, filters, or any other elements you want, and export them in your desired format.

For content creators who already use Canva (and there are lots of them), the AI image generator is a dream feature.

Free AI Image Creator #6: ArtBreeder

ArtBreeder create page with 4 images and Mixer Patterns Splicer and Collager

ArtBreeder is another fantastic free AI image generator that allows you to create stunning photos and visuals.

Apart from generating images with text commands, ArtBreeder allows you to mix different images to create unique visuals.

For example, you can upload your photos and combine them with AI-generated pictures to create unique visuals.

You can also pick images from ArtBreeder’s public library and make complex combinations with dozens of photos.

Similarly, you can create unique landscape images that follow specific patterns by configuring them in ArtBender. Here’s an example.

Artbreeder patterns page
image of a landscape painting in 4 squares

This opens up numerous possibilities to create eye-catching visuals for your digital products, social media posts, or blog content, following set rules and patterns.

However, ArtBreeder’s user interface looks dated, and it can take a few tries to fully understand how it works. But it is a powerful tool to help you generate different types of AI images.

Free AI Image Creator #7: Fotor

AIGC tools with using images to do Face swamp, AI Avatar, etc.

Fotor is a leading online graphic design tool that recently introduced a range of generative AI features, allowing you to create images in various ways.

Along with regular text-to-image features, Fotor allows you to generate artistic and cartoonish pictures from your photographs, replicate your photos in AI, generate AI avatars, and swap faces in images.

We liked Fotor’s text-to-image generator because of its simplicity and fast response times. We created an example image using the prompt, “an old man smiling with a short beard and a broken tooth”. We chose oil painting as our photo style.

Fotor image generator of an old man smiling with a short beard and a broken tooth

You can replicate the same image in different styles or replace its face using one of your photographs. In addition, you can choose different aspect ratios and color densities to modify your images.

Like Canva, Fotor also lets you edit your AI-generated images right away, making it an attractive choice for online content creators.

Free AI Image Creator #8: Picsart

homepage of Picsart where you can put in what you want and hit the generate button

Picsart is another online design tool similar to Canva, offering free various AI image creation and editing tools.

Its text-to-image creator allows you to create visuals in various styles, including photorealistic, cartoons, anime, and digital paintings.

It gives you a set of four images for every text prompt, allowing you to choose the best option. Here’s an example.

Picsart AI Image generator gives you 4 images of a dense forest with tall trees, lights coming out of it

Picsart stands out for its user experience and performance. It is a beautifully designed platform for beginners and non-technical users, allowing them to quickly find the most frequently used photo generation and editing options.

Its digital art filters are particularly impressive for creating NFTs or designs for eCommerce products. As a content creator, you’ll enjoy Picsart’s intuitive interface and robust features.

Free AI Image Creator #9: Freepik

Freepik AI homepage where you describe what you want to see and it will generate it

Freepik is one of the world’s most extensive online libraries of digital photography and images, including AI visuals.

It recently introduced a free AI image generator that allows you to create visuals for your social media posts, blog content, online courses, and digital products.

As a text-to-image generator, Freepik follows the same mechanism as the other tools in this list. You can choose different styles, aspect ratios, and effects to create your desired images.

8 images of superman generated in Freepik

Freepik also has an editor where you can enhance your AI images before downloading them to your computer.

The Best Realistic Paid Online AI Image Generation Apps

The free AI image generators we’ve discussed create stunning images and visuals based on your text prompts. But most of them come with usage or performance limitations.

So, if you’re a professional content creator looking for faster and better AI image results, consider the following premium AI image creators.

Paid AI Image Generator #1: Midjourney

Midjourney homepage with dark blue background and words Midjourney in center with arrows on bottom

Midjourney is among the most advanced AI image-creation engines with millions of customers. Based on a Discord server, Midjourney is technically a free tool.

But you won’t be able to use it for free because it only processes free users’ commands when no premium users are in the queue (which rarely happens).

So, to use Midjourney, you must subscribe to one of its monthly payment plans starting from $10.

How good is Midjourney? Probably the best AI image generation engine because of its image detail and quality. It can create jaw-dropping, photorealistic images from text prompts or turn your fantasies into a reality in various styles such as anime, cartoons, digital art, and abstract.

Here’s an example image created with Midjourney.

image of a little kid wiht a bucket hat on holdoing a camera sitting in a field of flowers

Can you believe this isn’t a real image? You can find hundreds of other examples in Midjourney’s Showcase.

How does Midjourney work? You simply type “/imagine” in Discord and describe your image in a detailed prompt.

For example, here’s the prompt used to generate the child’s image we just shared.

“toddler boy plays the camera, profile, enjoy nature, dynamic pose, Kodak Portra 400, high angle, hyper quality, 8k.”

Midjourney considers each keyword in the prompt to ensure the resulting image looks exactly as you want. It gives you four different options that you can upvote or downvote to share your feedback.

In short, if you’re a professional content creator serious about using unique and high-quality AI images, Midjourney should be at the top of your list.

Paid AI Image Generator #2: DALL.E3

Image of DALLE3 homepage with black background and option to Try ChatGPT

DALL.E3 is the world’s most advanced AI image generation engine, developed by OpenAI and built natively into ChatGPT. This means if you’re a ChatGPT premium user, you can use DALL.E3 as a feature.

How is it different from other AI image generators? As you play with some of the tools we’ve covered, you’ll find that most AI generators don’t always follow your prompts. Sometimes, they skip parts or add things you didn’t ask for. In other words, they’re not very accurate.

DALL.E3 fixes this problem to a great extent.

It is much more accurate than any other tool we’ve used and creates images that follow every part of your text prompt.

And here’s the best part.

You can simply ask ChatGPT to help you come up with the right prompts to generate accurate DALL.E3 images.

Here’s an example prompt.

4 images of a hedgehog with sunflowers

Another thing that makes DALL.E3 so advanced is that ChatGPT Plus can access real-time internet data. This feeds directly into DALL.E3 and allows it to analyze fresh data when creating images.

There are many other fun ways to use DALL.E3. For example, you can upload an image to ChatGPT Plus and ask it to interpret it. Then, you can tell ChatGPT to write a prompt for DALL.E3 to recreate that image.

The results will shock you.

It won’t create the exact image, but the detail in which it understands your query and makes realistic photos will surprise you.

So, at $20/month, ChatGPT Plus (including DALL.E3) is an absolute bargain for professional content creators.

Paid AI Image Generator #3: Jasper Art

Jasper homepage with square image boxes along the bottom

Jasper AI is a complete set of AI tools for modern creators and leads the market in AI content creation.

It recently added image generation features called Jasper Art, powered by OpenAI’s DALLE.3. If you look at Jasper solely as an image generator, it doesn’t make sense to prefer it over ChatGPT Plus.

However, when you consider its overall AI features, its powerful AI tool suite can solve your end-to-end content generation problems.

We say that because Jasper provides an easy-to-use and fully optimized user interface to communicate your requirements and generate content much faster than some of the other tools on this list.

When it comes to image generation, Jasper Art lets you describe your image in a text prompt box, and choose its style, colors, genre, and several other options.

So, as an expertise-based business owner selling online courses and digital products, you must consider Jasper as a one-stop solution to all your AI content generation needs instead of just an image generator.

You can learn more about using Jasper in our detailed review.

Try Jasper for free button

Paid AI Image Generator #4: Simplified

Simplified homepage
Black backgound
Red square with a blue orange sliced in half

If you’re looking for one tool to handle all your AI writing, content generation, video editing, and image generation needs, Simplified is the answer. Like Jasper, Simplified allows you to create AI-driven workflows and solves all your content creation problems.

Its AI image generator has a user-friendly interface that uses DALL.E and Stable Diffusion at the backend to generate photorealistic, anime, digital painting, abstract, and other forms of AI images.

Here are some of the images generated with Simplified.

10 squares with different image in each square

Unlike many other AI image generators, Simplified allows you to choose DALL.E or Stable Diffusion for creating images. As both these AI models have different strengths, you can use them according to your needs.

black page with 2 images under generated results and option to Select a Filter and Select Model from DALL-E or Diffusion

We were also quite impressed by the processing speeds of Simplified. It worked faster than other AI generators and produced accurate results for most of our text prompts.

So, if you’re looking for a one-stop AI content generation solution, Simplified is certainly worth considering.

Paid AI Image Generator #5: NightCafe

Astronauts in background
Create Stunning AI Art Text overlay
Red CREATE button

If you’re a creative artist or sell digital art for a living, you’ll love NightCafe.

It is an AI art generator designed for painters and people looking to turn their imagination into reality.

NightCafe can create stunning artwork from your text prompts and help you establish a unique brand style.

Here are a few examples of images created with NightCafe.

8 boxes with an image in each box
Girl with blue hair, water with purple snowy trees, girl with white hair and pruple crown, a swarm of orange, yellow and white fish,
an old book opened up with a candle on top, ruins, 

7. black cat in a field of daisies, 

8. scene with pink and purple trees and a stream

If you want a head start, click any image from NightCafe’s public showroom and start evolving it in its image editor. You’ll not be able to see its original text prompt, but you also get the tools to enhance its appearance.

image generated of a field of purple flowers and a stream with moon and mountains

You can also upload your own images to train NightCafe’s AI and get more accurate results against your prompts.

Paid AI Image Generator #6: Dream by Wombo

purple background
phone 
Create more with Dream
QR code
Create Button

If you’re a fan of abstract or fantasy artwork, Dream by Wombo is the perfect AI image generator. It uses diffusion modeling to create dreamlike images with bright colors and unique object combinations based on your text prompts.

Unlike other AI image generators, Dream creates pretty impressive results, even for short text prompts, making it an easy-to-use tool for beginners.

Here’s a beautiful example of what Dream can help you create.

a mouse with armor on up against two cats one big and one smaller

Although Dream offers different photo styles, it works best for fantasy, dark fantasy, horror, dreamland, and anime categories.

Paid AI Image Generator #7: Adobe Firefly

Image of a dog in a sweater and Your imagination's new best friend text on top of a orange, yellow blue background

Adobe is the global leader in software technology related to design, creativity, and visual content. So, it’s no surprise that it leads the way in generative AI technology as well.

In Firefly, Adobe has one of the world’s most advanced and robust AI image generators that can accurately create a diverse range of visuals from simple text prompts.

It uses a diffusion model trained on Adobe Stock images and public domain content with expired copyright. Plus, it uses all the years of design research by Adobe teams.

As a result, Adobe Firefly generates amazingly detailed images by accurately understanding your text prompts.

4 images created in Firefly of a 70's kitchen

The great thing about Firefly is that you can export its images in Adobe Express and use the tool’s advanced AI editing features like generative fill and background remover or fine-tune its appearance with additional filters and color themes.

In short, Adobe Firefly should be a critical part of any modern marketer’s AI toolkit.

Which Is The Best AI Image Generator For Your Business?

Generative AI is still an evolving technology, which means all the tools in this article are continuously improving. But which ones are right for your business?

The answer, of course, depends on your specific needs.

But here’s our list of the best AI image generators for different use cases and business types.

  • The Most Detailed And High-Quality Images: Midjourney
  • The Most Accurate Image Generator: DALL.E3
  • The Best Free AI Image Generator: Stable Diffusion
  • The Best AI Image Workflow App: Jasper AI
  • The Best AI Image Generator For Professionals: Adobe FireFly

You can use the free AI image generators right away. But even the premium tools on our list offer limited trials or image credits. So, play with them using different prompts to see which ones generate the best results for you.

Remember, AI tools are only as good as your imagination. So, fine-tune your prompts and help these tools understand your need to generate accurate results.

Head shot of Learning Revolution Founder Jeff Cobb

Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution

Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.

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