Stable Diffusion
Open-source image model you can run anywhere.
Watch the demoOfficial walkthroughStable Diffusion is open-source image model you can run anywhere. Freemium, with paid plans from Free.
About Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is the family of open-weight image generation models from Stability AI that turned text-to-image into a community phenomenon. The lineup includes Stable Diffusion 1.5, SDXL, SD3 and the latest Stable Diffusion 3.5 in several sizes, plus specialized models for higher resolution, photorealism and turbo speed. Because weights are openly downloadable on Hugging Face under permissive licenses, the model powers a huge ecosystem of tools like Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Forge, Fooocus, InvokeAI and Draw Things, and is the base for thousands of fine-tunes and LoRAs on Civitai. Stability AI also offers a hosted API and the Stable Assistant chat product. The technology is used by artists, indie devs, game studios and enterprises that need to run image generation on their own hardware or fine-tune on private data.
Stable Diffusion pros and cons
Hand-derived from the catalog data, strengths and trade-offs to weigh before signing up.
- Free tier available; paid plans from Free
- Open weights
- Multiple versions
- ControlNet support
- No autonomous agent, handles single prompts, not multi-step workflows
- Competition is strong in this space, see DALL·E and Playground AI for comparison
2 plans from Stable Diffusion
Pulled from Stable Diffusion’s public pricing page. Prices may change, verify on the vendor’s site before purchasing.
Community License
Free for researchers & small businesses
- Stable Diffusion 3.5 Suite
- SDXL Turbo
- Stable Audio Open
- For revenue under $1M/yr
Enterprise License
For commercial enterprise use
- Commercial rights
- Implementation support
- Custom model training
- Consulting services
Stable Diffusion vs Image Generation
Side-by-side with the top 3 other image generation in this category.
| Picked from the top tools in image generation | Open-source image model you can run anywhere. | OpenAI's image model integrated into ChatGPT. | Free-tier image generator with a friendly editor. | Multi-model AI workspace for image and video generation, reference workflows, and natural-language editing. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTS AT | Free | $20/mo | $15/mo | , |
| PRICING | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| AI AGENT | No | No | No | No |
| EDITOR'S PICK | No | No | No | No |
| KEY FEATURES | Open weights, Multiple versions, ControlNet support | Native ChatGPT use, Text rendering, Prompt iteration | Playground v3, Canvas editor, Mix images | 25+ image and video models in one workspace (Imagen 4, Veo 3, PixVerse), Text-to-image and text-to-video generation, Multi-reference workflows for consistent results |
| BEST FOR | Local generation, Custom fine-tuning, App integration | Illustrations, Concept art, Social graphics | Marketing visuals, Social graphics, Product mockups | Generating marketing images and short videos from a prompt, Comparing multiple AI models on the same brief, Producing reference-guided visuals that stay on-style |
| WORKS WITH | #image#open-source#local | #image#openai#chatgpt | #image#editor#free | , |
Stable Diffusion, frequently asked questions
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Related tools
OpenAI's image model integrated into ChatGPT.
Free-tier image generator with a friendly editor.
Multi-model AI workspace for image and video generation, reference workflows, and natural-language editing.
Commercially safe AI image generator from Adobe.