Leonardo AI
A Tier · 8.3/10
Versatile AI image generator with fine-tuned models and a generous free tier
Score Breakdown
The Good and the Bad
What we like
- +Genuinely useful free tier -- 150 tokens daily is enough to experiment
- +Great web UI with real-time canvas, image-to-image, and inpainting
- +Fine-tuned models for specific styles (photorealism, anime, game assets)
- +Training your own models on custom datasets is straightforward
What could be better
- −Token system is confusing -- different features burn tokens at different rates
- −Quality doesn't quite reach Midjourney for artistic compositions
- −Some fine-tuned community models produce inconsistent results
- −The UI can feel overwhelming with all the options
Pricing
Free
- ✓150 tokens/day
- ✓Basic models
- ✓Community features
Apprentice
- ✓8,500 tokens/mo
- ✓All models
- ✓Private generations
Artisan
- ✓25,000 tokens/mo
- ✓Priority processing
- ✓API access
Known Issues
- PLAN RENAME + A NEW TOP TIER -- OUR OLD PLAN NAMES NO LONGER EXIST (checked 2026-08-03, vendor pricing page): the Apprentice and Artisan tiers are gone. Solo tiers are now **Free / Essential $12 / Premium $30 / Ultimate $60** per month (ex. tax), with annual billing up to 20% off. The $12 and $30 price points survived the rename but the allowances are now explicit: **8,500 / 25,000 / 60,000 fast tokens per month** against token banks of 25,500 / 75,000 / 180,000, and 10 / 20 / 50 personal AI models. **Premium and above get unlimited relaxed-pace image generation; only Ultimate gets unlimited relaxed-pace video.** Team plans start at **Starter $72/mo ($24/seat)** and **Growth $144/mo ($48/seat)**, plus a separate API tier. One thing the page now states plainly: **Essential is 'Included with Canva Business'** -- Leonardo is a Canva property, so if your organisation already pays for Canva Business you may already have thisSource: Leonardo AI pricing page (leonardo.ai/pricing) · 2026-08-03
- Token consumption rates changed without clear notice, some users reported using tokens faster than expectedSource: Reddit r/leonardoai · 2026-02
Best for
Anyone who wants a capable image generator without paying upfront. The free tier is real, not a 3-image trial. Great for game devs and content creators who need specific styles.
Not for
If you only care about the absolute best image quality and don't mind paying, Midjourney still edges it out.
Our Verdict
Leonardo AI hits a sweet spot that most competitors miss. The free tier is genuinely useful, the web interface is polished, and the fine-tuned models give you more control than DALL-E. It's not quite Midjourney quality, but it's close -- and you can actually try it before paying.
Sources
- Leonardo AI official site (accessed 2026-03-26)
- G2 Reviews (accessed 2026-03-26)
- Reddit r/leonardoai (accessed 2026-03-26)
- Hands-on testing (accessed 2026-03-26)
Explore more Leonardo AI rankings
Deeper leaderboards, benchmarks, task-specific tier lists, and status/pricing pages for Leonardo AI.
The Tier List Tuesday
Weekly newsletter: tier movers, new entrants, and the VS of the week. Built from our daily AI-tool sweeps. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Alternatives to Leonardo AI
Midjourney
**Midjourney's alpha site gained shared folders and a Thinking mode in its 10/7 changelog: collaborators can now generate into a shared folder, and 'Rerun (Thinking)' has V8.2 inspect its own image for missed prompt details -- wrong objects, layout, anatomy, text -- and generate again.** Industry-leading AI image generation with stunning artistic quality. **The V8.2 Edit Model opened to everyone on 2026-08-27** -- instruction-based edits, up to four image references (replacing omni-reference), inpainting and outpainting -- and the **2026-09-24 update** makes targeted edits change only the pixels you select, adds live style previews, and fixes --tile seams on V8.1/8.2. V8.2 itself launched 2026-07-24 as the default model. No price change
DALL-E (Shut Down)
**Nov 2026: the migration targets moved again -- gpt-image-1 was shut down on 2026-10-23, and gpt-image-1.5 and gpt-image-1-mini (which this page used to recommend) are deprecated with removal on 2026-12-01; since 2026-11-05 OpenAI's deprecations table names the new gpt-image-2.6-sunburst / gpt-image-2.6-flare (released 2026-11-04) as the replacement, where it previously named the 2.5 pair.** OpenAI's DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 -- SHUT DOWN. Both APIs were retired on 2026-05-12. Existing integrations now fail; the GPT Image request shape differs (not a drop-in swap). Tier-list alternatives: Nano Banana 2, Midjourney, FLUX.2 [klein], Ideogram
Stable Diffusion
Open-source AI image generation with unlimited free local use and full customization
Adobe Firefly
Adobe's AI image generator -- commercially safe and baked into Creative Cloud. Firefly AI Assistant public beta is now LIVE globally (2026-04-27) for Creative Cloud Pro and paid Firefly plans, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and Illustrator from a single chat
Ideogram
**Nov 2026: Ideogram 4.5 is the new headline model and the plans were rebuilt around credits.** AI image platform known for text rendering -- Ideogram 4.5 (precise multi-turn editing, native 2K, API from $0.03/image), Ideogram 4.0 open weights (9.3B DiT, 0.97 X-Omni OCR; the free download is non-commercial, commercial self-hosting from $300/mo), Ideogram Vector SVG output, and other labs' image and video models on one credit balance. Plus $20/mo ($15 billed yearly), Pro $60/mo, Team $30/user
Flux (FLUX 3 + FLUX 3 Image Klein)
**FLUX 3 Image Klein (2026-10-15) is the new local pick: a 5.6B open-weight text-to-image and editing model with native 4K, bounding-box control and up to 10 reference images, runnable in 8GB of VRAM with the INT8 build, free for commercial use under $5M annual revenue, and $0.009 per 1K image on the BFL API.** Black Forest Labs' model family has moved past still images. **FLUX 3** is a single multimodal foundation model trained across images, video and audio (Early Access 2026-07-23); **FLUX 3 Video went GA on the BFL API on 2026-08-04** with clips up to 20 seconds, native audio, multi-shot scenes and 1080p output, priced per second of video ($0.17/s HD text-to-video). **FLUX 3 Action (2026-09-22)** is an open-weight 7B world action model for robots. The open-core FLUX.2 [klein] image models (Jan 2026, sub-0.5s generation) remain the local-inference workhorse
Krea AI
Real-time AI image generation and enhancement with a visual, interactive canvas
NightCafe
Community-driven AI art generator with multiple models, daily free credits, and a social gallery
Nano Banana 2.1 (Gemini Nano Banana 2.1, formerly Nano Banana 2)
**Nano Banana 2.1 went GA on the Gemini API on 2026-10-06 as the update to Nano Banana 2, with better visual quality, prompt adherence, multi-turn character consistency and text rendering, new 1:4 to 8:1 panoramic ratios, and a lower price -- $0.0336 per 1K image versus $0.067 -- while Google is retiring gemini-3.1-flash-image in its favour (no end date yet).** Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Image model -- the best-in-class text-in-image renderer, now the default across the Gemini app
Microsoft MAI-Image-2.6
**MAI-Image-2.7 entered preview on 2026-10-27 as an image editing model, No. 3 on Arena Edit and No. 2 on Artificial Analysis image editing at launch (ranks as stated by Microsoft that day), on Arena, Artificial Analysis and MAI Playground, with text-to-image to follow. The same day Microsoft said MAI-Image-2.6 and 2.6 Flash are generally available in Foundry.** Rank history below is dated; read each rank as of its date. Microsoft's in-house image model -- **MAI-Image-2.6 launched 2026-08-10: No. 2 on Arena text-to-image (+79 Elo over 2.5, text rendering +91), and as of 2026-09-04 back to **No. 2 on Arena image editing** as well, plus No. 2 text-to-image and No. 1 image editing on Artificial Analysis -- ahead of Google's Nano Banana family and Meta's Muse Image. **On 2026-09-04 it reached Microsoft Foundry for developers alongside a new MAI-Image-2.6-Flash** (2.8x faster than GPT-Image-2-Medium at 72% greater efficiency), both adding multi-image reference editing, web grounding and dynamic aspect ratios.** The prior MAI-Image-2.5 launched 2026-06-02 at Build (#2 image editing, #3 text-to-image on Arena, surpassing Nano Banana Pro's Arena score; +75 overall vs MAI-Image-2). Live in PowerPoint + OneDrive, on Azure Foundry, MAI Playground, and OpenRouter. Ultra-efficient MAI-Image-2.5-Flash now LIVE in Foundry ($1.75/$1.75/$19.50 per 1M). Original MAI-Image-2 shipped 2026-04-02
Meta Muse (Image + Video)
**Muse Image reached developers on the Meta Model API on 2026-08-25 at a flat $0.01 per image** (built-in web and image search included; failed or safety-filtered images are not billed), and Meta One's Core ($7.99/mo) and Premium ($19.99/mo) bundles (2026-09-15) add more Muse-powered image and video generation in Meta's apps. Meta Superintelligence Labs' first media-generation models (launched 2026-07-07) -- Muse Image is GA across the Meta AI app, Instagram, and WhatsApp (Arena #2 for text-to-image); Muse Video is in preview (Arena #3 for text-to-video). Instruction-faithful editing, multi-reference composition, tool use, and Content Seal provenance watermarking