Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is an open-source image generation model from Stability AI. The main difference from Midjourney: you can download and run it locally on your computer. Free, uncensored, no restrictions on requests.

For a marketer without a strong GPU, this sounds great, but in practice the barrier to entry is high: you need to figure out ComfyUI or Automatic1111, install the necessary checkpoints, configure LoRA to the desired style. I spent a week on this before getting results of comparable quality to Midjourney. But then I got full control: fine-tuning the style, generation without the Internet, use in automated pipelines via API.

In projects with a stable flow of visual content - for example, product cards or advertising banners in the same style - local Stable Diffusion with additionally trained LoRA gives the best price/quality/speed ratio. For one-off tasks or mood boards, I still go back to Midjourney - it's just faster.