Flux

Flux is a family of open-source text-to-image models developed by Black Forest Labs, founded by the original creators of Stable Diffusion. Released in mid-2024, the Flux models immediately established themselves as the highest-quality open-source image generation option available, with output quality that rivals or exceeds Midjourney's V6 at zero cost when run locally.

The Flux family includes three variants for different use cases: Flux Schnell is optimized for speed (2-4 steps, extremely fast), Flux Dev offers higher quality with moderate speed for development and experimentation, and Flux Pro delivers the best quality for production use. All model weights are publicly available on Hugging Face. The models are particularly strong at photorealistic portraits, complex scenes with multiple subjects, and accurate text rendering within images.

Flux is accessed through third-party platforms rather than a native web interface: Replicate, fal.ai, and Together.ai all offer Flux API access with pay-per-image pricing around $0.003-0.05 per generation depending on the variant. ComfyUI and Automatic1111 support Flux for local use. The prompt style differs somewhat from Midjourney — Flux responds better to descriptive prose than keyword-heavy Midjourney prompts. For developers and technically capable users, Flux provides Midjourney-level quality at a fraction of the cost or entirely free.