Flux

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Black Forest Labs' open-weights image model — rivals Midjourney quality.

Freemium· API per-image; weights free for [schnell] and [dev]Image GenerationFlux.1 [schnell / dev / pro]9.0 / 10

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Best for

Pick Flux when you want frontier-tier image quality with open weights or self-hosting options.

Skip if

Skip it if you want a turnkey web app — Midjourney's UX is more polished.

Flux comes from Black Forest Labs, founded by the original Stable Diffusion team. Flux.1 [pro] competes with Midjourney v6/v7 on aesthetics and prompt adherence while [schnell] and [dev] are open-weights and self-hostable. The release reset the open-source image-gen landscape almost overnight.

For self-hosted production, Flux is the new default — better than SDXL on every axis, and trainable. For API access, Flux Pro is available via Replicate, Together, fal, and Black Forest Labs' own API at competitive per-image rates. Inside ComfyUI and the rest of the open-source tooling ecosystem, Flux support is now first-class.

The trade-offs: Flux Pro is API-only (no open weights for the top model), and self-hosting [dev] needs a serious GPU (24GB+ VRAM for comfortable inference). The community ecosystem of LoRAs and fine-tunes is younger than SD's but growing fast.

Editor's take

Flux is the most important image-gen release of the last 18 months. It reset the open-source ceiling, gave Stability a serious competitor, and made "self-hosted production image gen" a realistic choice again.

— The AI Tool Bible editorial team