Overview
FLUX by Black Forest Labs (the original Stable Diffusion creators) is the open-source challenger to Midjourney. FLUX.1 Pro produces photorealistic images with excellent prompt adherence and can be used free via Hugging Face or cheaply via Replicate and Fal.ai APIs.
Pricing
Free tierFree on Hugging Face Spaces and ComfyUI locally
Paid plansReplicate/Fal.ai: ~$0.003–$0.055 per image
✅ When to use
- High-volume generation where Midjourney subscription cost adds up
- API access to integrate image generation into your own app
- Running locally for complete privacy and unlimited free use (requires GPU)
- Photorealistic images where open-source quality is now competitive
- Building image generation pipelines with ComfyUI
❌ When NOT to use
- Casual one-off images — Midjourney's web interface is far more user-friendly
- When you need the absolute best aesthetic quality — Midjourney still leads
- If you don't want to deal with API setup or local GPU requirements
💡 Personal Tips
FLUX.1 Pro via Fal.ai is my go-to for batch image generation in projects — $0.003 per image vs Midjourney's $0.01+ makes it dramatically cheaper at scale. For photorealistic content the quality holds up excellently. For artistic work Midjourney is still better. Locally via ComfyUI on an RTX 3080+ it's completely free. New fine-tunes and LoRAs for specific styles are released weekly.