Midjourney vs DALL-E vs FLUX vs Ideogram: I Generated 200 Images to Find the Best

The image generation market has fragmented. Midjourney for art, GPT Image for text, FLUX for free, Ideogram for logos. Here are the receipts.

I gave each image generator the same 50 prompts across five categories: photorealistic portraits, product mockups, text-heavy designs (logos and posters), abstract art, and architectural visualization. Then I had five people blind-rate the outputs on a 1-10 scale.

The results weren't even close in some categories — and dead even in others.

Overall Quality Scores

Average quality rating across all 50 prompts (blind-rated by 5 evaluators):

Midjourney v7 won overall, which surprised nobody. But the margins matter. On photorealistic portraits, Midjourney scored 9.2 versus GPT Image's 7.8 — a massive gap. On product mockups, the scores were nearly identical (8.5 vs 8.3). On text-heavy designs (where you need readable text in the image), GPT Image 1.5 scored 9.1 versus Midjourney's 6.4. Text rendering is still Midjourney's Achilles' heel.

FLUX at 7.9 is remarkable because it's free and open source. You can run it locally on a decent GPU with zero ongoing cost. For teams doing high-volume generation where "pretty good" is sufficient, FLUX eliminates the subscription entirely.

Adobe Firefly scored lowest on pure quality but has an ace up its sleeve: it's the only generator trained exclusively on licensed content. For commercial use where copyright matters — ad campaigns, product packaging, brand materials — Firefly's legal safety is worth the quality tradeoff.

The Pricing Breakdown

Image generation pricing is all over the map:

My recommendation: use Midjourney for hero images, brand photography, and anything where artistic quality matters. Use GPT Image for anything with text in it (marketing banners, social media graphics with captions, infographics). Use FLUX for bulk generation, testing concepts, and any situation where free matters more than perfect.

And if you're building an app that generates images, the API pricing changes the math entirely. GPT Image at $0.02-0.19 per image is the most accessible API. Midjourney still doesn't have a public API, which limits its programmatic use.