LEONARDO
The real-time generator literally updates the picture as you type
PROS Extremely fast free tier quota resets daily workflow balances prompts with traditional controls
CONS No private image generation on free plan inconsistent quality
SCORE
PRICE
From free to $60 per month
from
leonardo.ai
W
hen using Leonardo’s free plan, all of your creations are public, as they are with the lower-tier Midjourney plans. You’re also limited to 150 fast tokens daily. Although that sounds a lot, our prompt for a photorealistic cat ate up 40. You can’t generate anything larger than “medium”-sized images with a free plan, can’t generate images privately, and don’t get access to the most advanced features, so there are plenty of reasons to upgrade if you find it’s a platform you like. Some functions incur lower charges, such as unzooming – currently in beta – which reveals more of an image’s surroundings and costs five tokens. Removing a background deducts two. Alongside the regular image size presets, there’s a slider like the one in Midjourney to increment between portrait and landscape, as well as presets optimised for social media, TV and even cinema use. In our tests, including orientation and proportion information as part of the prompt was ignored in favour of this setting. This was a common behaviour across the platforms on test.