Tool Introduction

Midjourney, Inc. is an independent AI research lab based in San Francisco, founded in 2021 by David Holz, previously a co-founder of the hand-tracking company Leap Motion. The image-generation model entered open beta on July 12, 2022. The lab operates as a self-funded, distributed team of about 60 people, has never taken outside venture capital, and reached profitability within roughly a year of founding.

Access runs through midjourney.com and an official Discord server and bot, the original interface. The Midjourney Discord server passed one million members within three months of private testing, and about 7 million Discord servers have installed the Midjourney bot.

Demo Available?

No free trial is available on the midjourney.com website or in Discord for the core subscription; a limited trial exists only on the separate niji·journey mobile app.

Aggregate Rating

2.2/5 stars (based on 447+ verified reviews across the internet)

Detailed Overview

What Midjourney Does

Midjourney generates images from written descriptions. A user types a prompt into the Imagine bar on the Create page or the Discord /imagine command, and the service returns a grid of four images per job. Results can then be upscaled, varied, panned, zoomed, or reworked with the built-in Editor for inpainting. Reference images steer composition, apply a style, or keep a subject consistent across generations.

Who Midjourney Is For

Concept artists, illustrators, marketing and graphic designers, and game or film pre-visualization artists use Midjourney for ideation, mood-boarding, and finished visual assets. The Discord community draws hobbyists and enthusiasts exploring aesthetic styles. Professionals and small studios that need private generation and higher throughput adopt it for commercial creative work, and large platform companies licensing its aesthetic technology form a separate technology-partner audience.

Top Differentiators

Midjourney ships its community and discovery layer as first-party surfaces: the Explore page, a Style Explorer, public Hot and Top feeds, and a native Discord of millions, rather than bolting discovery on afterward. Generation is metered in GPU hours across Fast, Relax, and Turbo modes instead of per-image credits or per-call fees. The default V8.1 model renders standard jobs roughly 4 to 5 times faster than earlier versions.

Founding Year

2021

Target Industry

B2C, Prosumer, SMB, Enterprise, Concept Art, Illustration, Graphic Design, Marketing, Advertising, Game Development, Film Pre-Visualization, Social Media Content, Medical Imaging

Available Integrations

Discord: the original and fully supported interface, using slash commands including /imagine, /blend, /describe, and /settings; each participant needs an individual paid subscription, usable in servers under 1,000 members.
midjourney.com website: the primary non-Discord workflow with Create, Organize, Explore, and a separate Editor, sharing one account and job queue with Discord; Stealth Mode is limited to Pro and Mega.
Niji Journey: a co-branded, anime-focused iOS and Android app developed with partner Spellbrush; accounts sync with Midjourney, and it requires iOS 15.1 or later with its own in-app purchase tiers.
Enterprise API: announced via an official survey but not yet shipped; interested companies apply through a form, and no public keys, endpoint docs, or SDKs exist.
Hardware project: teased through a Discord and X livestream reveal, described only as ambitious and physically big, with no manufacturing partner or product disclosed.

Midjourney sells four monthly-recurring subscription tiers, billable monthly or annually. Annual billing pays the full year upfront for a 20% discount versus monthly. There is no free, perpetual tier for any plan.

Basic: $10/month ($96/year, $8/mo equivalent), 3.3 hours of Fast GPU time per month, no Relax Mode, video generation limited to SD resolution, 3 concurrent Fast image jobs and 1 Fast video job, max repeat/permutation size of 4, no Stealth Mode.
Standard: $30/month ($288/year, $24/mo equivalent), 15 hours of Fast GPU time, unlimited Relax Mode for images, 3 concurrent Fast-or-Relax image jobs and 3 Fast video jobs, max size of 10, no Stealth Mode.
Pro: $60/month ($576/year, $48/mo equivalent), 30 hours of Fast GPU time, unlimited Relax Mode for images and SD video, 12 concurrent Fast (or 3 Relax) image jobs, 6 Fast (or 3 Relax) video jobs, max size of 40, and Stealth Mode.
Mega: $120/month ($1,152/year, $96/mo equivalent), 60 hours of Fast GPU time, unlimited Relax Mode for images and SD video, 12 concurrent Fast (or 3 Relax) image jobs, 12 Fast (or 3 Relax) video jobs, max size of 40, and Stealth Mode.

Extra Fast GPU hours cost $4/hour once the monthly allocation is exhausted, and this add-on pricing is experimental and subject to change. Fast GPU time does not roll over between billing cycles. Upgrading applies a prorated credit and takes effect immediately; downgrading takes effect at the next renewal with no refund for the current period. Companies with more than $1,000,000 in gross annual revenue must be on the Pro or Mega plan. Group Plans and consolidated Corporate Billing are offered only for organizations purchasing 50 or more yearly Pro or Mega subscriptions; Midjourney does not offer organizational discounts, free plans, seat management, or SSO.

Pricing last verified: 07/07/2026
Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change. Please confirm current pricing on the vendor site.

Features & Specs

Subscription tiers: Basic $10/month, Standard $30/month, Pro $60/month, Mega $120/month, with annual billing at a 20% discount paid upfront.
Fast GPU-hour allotments: 3.3 hours (Basic), 15 hours (Standard), 30 hours (Pro), 60 hours (Mega) per month.
GPU speed modes: Fast draws from the monthly allotment, Relax is unlimited but queued with 0 to 30 minute waits on qualifying plans, and Turbo runs up to 4x faster while consuming double Fast time per image.
Default model: V8.1, released April 30, 2026 and made default June 10 to 11, 2026, generating in about 4 seconds standard or 12 seconds in HD mode.
HD mode: native 2K images at roughly 2x the dimensions and 4x the resolution of V7 output.
Reference inputs: Image Prompts for composition and style, Style References, and Omni Reference for a consistent character or subject across generations.
Video: V1 Video Model, launched June 18, 2025, animates an image into four 5-second clips, extendable up to four times in roughly 4-second increments, at about 8x the cost of a standard image job.
Niji line: a separate model, most recently Niji 7 (January 9, 2026), for anime and Eastern aesthetics.
Stealth Mode: private generations, available only on Pro and Mega plans.
Ownership: subscribers own their outputs; companies with more than $1,000,000 in annual gross revenue must be on Pro or Mega to own outputs commercially.

Security & Compliance

Per Midjourney's privacy policy, collected personal data includes username, submitted text and image prompts, IP address, contact and billing information, and generated outputs. The company states it does not sell personal information and shares data only with service providers, vendors, consultants, and third-party analytics and advertising partners.

Data location: personal data is stored on Midjourney servers in the United States, with EU and UK transfers relying on European Commission-approved standard contractual clauses.
Training use: data is used, among other purposes, through the process of training Midjourney machine learning algorithms.
Retention: data is kept only for as long as is necessary for the stated purposes, with usage data subject to shorter retention except where needed for security or functionality.
Deletion: requests via midjourney.com/account trigger a 7-day reversal window, with full account and data removal completing within up to 30 days; certain regional access and deletion requests are answered within a stated 45 to 90 day window.
Discord data: data from Discord-bot usage is governed by Discord's own privacy policy.

Industry Use-Cases

Meta technology licensing

On August 22, 2025, Meta announced a partnership to license Midjourney's aesthetic technology for its future models and products. Founder David Holz confirmed on X that the company remains independent and investor-free despite the deal. Neither side publicly disclosed the financial terms of this technology-licensing arrangement.

Midjourney Medical with Butterfly Network

Midjourney Medical, announced in June 2026, co-develops a full-body ultrasound scanner with Butterfly Network under a joint agreement. Per Butterfly Network's own press release, the prototype scanner incorporates 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system. A first clinical location is planned for San Francisco.

Tool's Alternatives

Adobe Firefly integrates natively into Photoshop and Creative Cloud through features like Generative Fill and Expand, and attaches Content Credentials provenance metadata to every output under the C2PA standard Adobe co-founded. Its commercially safe positioning and enterprise indemnification depend on staying inside Adobe's own training and app pipeline rather than an open, portable model. That built-in provenance metadata plus first-party embedding inside a dominant editing suite sets it apart from Midjourney's standalone generation surface.

Ideogram is purpose-built for accurate in-image typography, offering a structured JSON prompting interface with bounding-box layout and color-palette control plus Canvas tools such as Magic Fill and Extend. Editing uploaded images and unlimited canvases are gated to its paid Plus and Pro tiers. Its focus on reliable text rendering and multilingual typography addresses a category Midjourney has historically handled poorly, using an explicit structured-prompt interface Midjourney does not offer.

Leonardo.Ai provides Realtime Canvas, turning a rough sketch and text prompt into a finished image live on its own Phoenix foundation model. Since Canva's 2024 acquisition, its underlying technology is being folded into Canva's Magic Studio line, though the platform still operates independently with its existing plans. Its tie into a mainstream, non-art design suite contrasts with Midjourney's closed Discord and web ecosystem.

Stability AI / Stable Diffusion 3.5 ships open-weight models downloadable from Hugging Face and GitHub that can be self-hosted, with an optimized version running on consumer GPUs with as little as 2.4GB of VRAM. Its free Community License covers only organizations or individuals under $1M in total annual revenue, requiring a separately negotiated Enterprise License above that. It is the only genuinely self-hostable, open-weight option here, a fundamentally different deployment model from Midjourney's hosted-only service.

OpenAI GPT Image is a natively multimodal image model available inside ChatGPT and as a documented API, the gpt-image-1 family headlined by GPT Image 2, with three quality tiers and multiple output resolutions. Official pages do not state a documented context window or generation rate limit beyond that tier structure. Its public, developer-callable API inside a general-purpose assistant is the reverse of Midjourney's chat-bot-only, no-public-API model.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Midjourney do and how does it work?

Midjourney turns text prompts and reference images into AI-generated images and short videos. A user types a prompt into the Imagine bar or the Discord /imagine command and receives a grid of four images per job.

How much does a Midjourney subscription cost?

Four tiers bill monthly or annually: Basic at $10/month, Standard at $30/month, Pro at $60/month, and Mega at $120/month. Annual billing pays the full year upfront for a 20% discount.

Does Midjourney offer any free trial access?

No free trial is available on the midjourney.com website or in Discord. A limited trial exists only on the separate niji·journey mobile app for iOS and Android.

What are Fast, Relax, and Turbo GPU modes?

Fast draws from a monthly GPU-hour allotment, Relax runs unlimited but queued with 0 to 30 minute waits on qualifying plans, and Turbo runs up to 4x faster while consuming double Fast time.

Can companies use Midjourney images for commercial work?

Subscribers own the images and videos they create. Any company or employee at a firm with more than $1,000,000 in annual gross revenue must hold a Pro or Mega plan.

What is Stealth Mode and who gets it?

Stealth Mode keeps generations private and out of the public community feed. It is available only on the Pro and Mega plans, not on Basic or Standard.

Can Midjourney generate video from an image?

The V1 Video Model, launched June 18, 2025, animates an image into four 5-second clips, extendable up to four times in roughly 4-second increments, with automatic or manual motion.

Where is Midjourney user and prompt data stored?

Personal data including prompts, uploaded images, and billing information is stored on Midjourney servers in the United States. EU and UK transfers rely on European Commission-approved standard contractual clauses.

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Midjourney

Turn text prompts into AI images and short videos.