Midjourney Review 2025: The AI Art Generator That Stunned the Creative World

The Question That Would Not Go Away

A friend of mine -- a freelance illustrator who has been drawing since she could hold a pencil -- called me one evening last spring. She had been at a gallery opening in Mumbai, the kind where young artists show ambitious work and older artists show up to be seen. Someone had brought prints. Large, luminous, impossibly detailed landscapes that looked like they belonged in a fantasy novel illustrated by someone who had spent months on each piece. Colors that bled into each other like watercolor dreams. Light that fell through imaginary architecture in ways that made you want to step inside the frame.

"They were Midjourney," she said. Her voice was flat in a way that worried me. "Somebody typed words into a box and these came out. I've been drawing for twenty-two years and I couldn't make something that looked like that."

She was quiet for a moment.

"So what am I doing?"

I did not have an answer then. I am not sure I have one now, several months and over eight hundred Midjourney generations later. But I have spent enough time with this tool to know that the question she asked -- what is this technology, what does it mean, and where does it leave the people who make things with their hands -- is not one that a software review can settle. What I can tell you is what Midjourney actually does, how well it does it, what it costs, and what it felt like to use it as someone who is not an artist but has always wished they could be.

Experiment One: The Obvious Test

My first prompt was embarrassingly simple. I typed "a cat sitting on a windowsill, rain outside, warm light" into the Discord bot and waited. Forty seconds later, four images appeared. They were beautiful. Not just technically competent -- beautiful in the way a good photograph is beautiful, where the light tells a story and the composition draws your eye somewhere specific. The cat looked real but slightly idealized, the way a memory of a cat might look. The rain streaked the window glass. The warm interior light contrasted with the blue-gray sky outside in a way that was not just accurate but emotionally resonant.

I showed it to three people without telling them it was AI-generated. Two assumed it was a photograph. The third said it looked like a painting by someone who was very good at painting.

This is Midjourney's defining quality, and it has only gotten sharper with version 6.1: the images look like they were made by someone with taste. Not just technical skill -- taste. The compositions are balanced. The color palettes are considered. The lighting has drama. There is an aesthetic signature to Midjourney output that makes it immediately recognizable if you have seen enough of it, and that signature tends toward the cinematic, the painterly, the slightly-more-beautiful-than-reality.

Whether that is a feature or a limitation depends on what you are trying to make.

Experiment Two: Pushing the Machine

The obvious test tells you nothing. Any AI image generator can make a pretty cat. So I started pushing. I wanted to see where Midjourney's understanding broke down, where its aesthetic autopilot became a hindrance rather than a gift.

I tried abstract prompts: "the feeling of remembering something that never happened." The result was a figure standing in a corridor of doors, each slightly ajar, light leaking through in different colors. It was evocative. It was not what I imagined, but it was something -- and it was something I could not have articulated better than the machine interpreted it. That gap between what you mean and what the machine delivers is where the interesting creative tension lives.

I tried ugly prompts. "An overexposed polaroid of a gas station at 3am, grimy, mundane, no beauty." Midjourney could not help itself. The gas station was bathed in this gorgeous neon glow. The grime was artfully rendered. The mundane was, against my explicit instructions, kind of stunning. This is the bias people talk about. Midjourney wants everything to be beautiful, and fighting that impulse is genuinely difficult. For commercial work where you need a specific mood that is not "cinematic wonder," this can be a real problem.

I tried technical stress tests. Hands -- the famous AI weakness -- came out with five fingers and correct proportions in about seven out of ten generations. A dramatic improvement from the nightmarish digit mutations of earlier versions. Text rendering was hit or miss: short words like "OPEN" or "CAFE" on signs rendered legibly about half the time. Longer text was still unreliable. Spatial reasoning -- "a red ball on top of a blue box, behind a green cylinder" -- worked more often than not, though complex multi-object scenes occasionally produced spatial nonsense.

Experiment Three: Style As a Conversation

The feature that changed how I thought about Midjourney was style references -- the --sref parameter. You feed it an existing image, and it uses that image's aesthetic DNA (colors, mood, technique, lighting treatment) to guide new generations. I gave it a photograph from a 1970s National Geographic spread -- warm tones, slightly desaturated, that specific film grain -- and asked for a street scene in Tokyo. What came back looked like a lost frame from the same magazine. Not a copy. A continuation.

For anyone doing commercial creative work, this is where Midjourney stops being a toy and starts being a production tool. You can establish a visual language with a single reference and then generate endless variations that feel coherent. Brand consistency, which is one of the hardest things to maintain in visual content creation, becomes almost trivial. A startup without a design budget can create a visually cohesive Instagram feed, a set of blog illustrations, and a pitch deck that all feel like they came from the same artistic sensibility. That would have required hiring an illustrator six months ago.

Character references -- the --cref parameter -- attempt to maintain a recognizable character across multiple generations. It works, mostly. A character's face and general vibe stay consistent across different poses and settings, though if you push the variations too far (say, from a close-up portrait to a full-body action scene), drift creeps in. For sequential storytelling or marketing campaigns featuring a recurring character, it is usable but imperfect. You will need to cherry-pick and iterate rather than trust the first result.

The Interface Problem (And the Web Solution)

I need to talk about Discord. Midjourney's original interface -- and still the most feature-complete one -- is a Discord bot. You type commands in chat channels. You receive images as chat messages. Your generation history is a scroll through a Discord server. For people who already live in Discord, this is fine. For everyone else, it is baffling. My mother, who wanted to make custom greeting cards, took one look at the Discord interface and asked if she was supposed to be a hacker.

The web interface at midjourney.com has improved dramatically and is clearly the platform's future. It has a proper image gallery, search and filtering, prompt composition tools, and an editing interface for inpainting and outpainting that feels much more like a creative application than a chat bot. The Explore page, where you can browse other users' creations along with their prompts, is one of the best learning tools in the ecosystem -- it is essentially an infinite gallery of prompt engineering examples.

Still, as of late 2024, some advanced features and the most recent experimental models sometimes appear on Discord first. The web interface is catching up, but the gap has not fully closed.

What It Costs to Dream

Midjourney has no free tier. That is worth stating plainly because every competitor offers some form of free access. Here, you pay before you generate your first image.

The Basic plan is ten dollars a month. You get roughly 200 generations, which sounds modest but is enough for a casual explorer who wants to play with prompts on weekends and come away with a handful of images they love. I burned through my first 200 in about four days because I could not stop tweaking prompts, but most people are more disciplined than I am.

The Standard plan, at thirty dollars a month, is where most regular users land. Around 900 fast generations, plus unlimited "relaxed" mode generations that take longer to process but do not count against your allocation. The relaxed queue waits are usually under ten minutes, which is manageable if you are not in a rush. For anyone using Midjourney several times a week, Standard is the sweet spot between cost and creative freedom.

The Pro plan costs sixty dollars a month and adds stealth mode -- your generations stay private instead of appearing in the community gallery. If you are a designer generating concepts for a client or an agency developing campaign visuals, stealth mode is not optional. You do not want your unreleased creative work visible to millions of strangers. Pro also gives you about 1,800 fast generations and twelve concurrent fast jobs, which matters when you are iterating rapidly.

The Mega plan, at $120 a month, doubles everything in Pro. It exists for studios and heavy users who generate thousands of images monthly. All paid plans include a commercial license, though companies earning over one million dollars annually need to be on Pro or above.

Compared to what these images replace -- stock photography subscriptions, freelance illustrator fees, in-house design time -- Midjourney's pricing is absurdly cheap for the volume of usable output it produces. That comparison is, of course, exactly what makes working illustrators uncomfortable, and they are not wrong to be.

The Upscale and the Edit

Once you have an image you like, Midjourney's post-generation tools let you push it further. Standard upscaling produces 1024x1024 images. The 2x and 4x upscales take that to 2048 or 4096 pixels, adding genuine detail rather than just interpolating pixels -- surfaces gain texture, edges sharpen, and the image looks meaningfully better at large sizes. The subtle upscale stays faithful to the original; the creative upscale adds new details that were not there before, which can be wonderful or unwanted depending on your intent.

Zoom out expands the canvas, generating new content around the original image. Pan extends it in a specific direction. Inpainting, available through the web interface, lets you select a region and regenerate just that area while keeping everything else intact. These tools collectively mean that your first generation is a starting point, not a final product. You can iterate, extend, refine, and adjust until the image matches your vision -- or at least gets close enough.

The Competitors, Honestly

DALL-E 3, built into ChatGPT, is easier to use and better at following specific instructions. If your prompt says "a red bicycle leaning against a yellow wall with the word HELLO written in chalk," DALL-E 3 will nail the details more reliably. But the images often feel flatter, less alive. Midjourney makes images you want to frame. DALL-E 3 makes images that correctly illustrate what you asked for. Both are useful; they scratch different itches.

Stable Diffusion is the open-source option, and for technically inclined users willing to run models locally and learn tools like ComfyUI and ControlNet, it offers control that Midjourney cannot match. You can train custom models on specific styles, control poses precisely, and generate without any content restrictions or subscription fees. The trade-off is a steep learning curve and, out of the box, noticeably lower image quality than Midjourney's latest versions.

Adobe Firefly is the "safe" choice -- trained exclusively on licensed Adobe Stock images, so the copyright situation is clearer. It integrates into Photoshop and Illustrator, which is a huge workflow advantage. But Firefly's output, while improving, tends toward competent stock photography rather than art. If you need legally defensible images for corporate use, Firefly is the pragmatic choice. If you want images that make people stop scrolling, Midjourney is where you go.

The Community as Curriculum

I have not mentioned the community, and I should. Midjourney's Discord server is one of the largest creative communities on the internet. Millions of people sharing work, dissecting prompts, and pushing each other to explore styles and subjects that would never occur to any individual. The public generation channels are a river of creativity flowing twenty-four hours a day. You can see, in real time, what thousands of people around the world are imagining. It is inspiring and overwhelming and a little bit like standing in the world's largest art museum where new paintings appear every second.

For learning, the community is irreplaceable. Prompt engineering -- the art of writing text descriptions that produce the images you want -- is a skill, and the best way to learn it is by studying what works for other people. The Explore page on the web interface lets you browse images with their prompts attached, essentially reverse-engineering the relationship between words and visuals. Within a week of active exploration, my prompts went from clumsy sentences to nuanced descriptions with specific style modifiers, aspect ratios, and weight adjustments. The learning curve is real, but the community flattens it considerably.

The Uncomfortable Questions

I would be dishonest if I wrote this review without addressing the ethics. Midjourney's model was trained on images scraped from the internet, including the work of artists who did not consent to having their art used as training data. The company has published no research papers explaining its technology and maintains a near-total silence about its training dataset. Several class-action lawsuits are pending. The question of whether AI-generated images infringe on the rights of artists whose work was used in training is not settled, legally or morally.

My illustrator friend, the one who called me that evening, has not stopped drawing. She has actually started using Midjourney herself -- for mood boards, for exploring color palettes, for generating reference images that she then reinterprets by hand. "It's a tool," she told me recently, with a kind of grudging acceptance. "A weird, uncomfortable, amazing tool that I'm not sure I should be using." She paused. "But I can't pretend it doesn't exist."

Where This Leaves Us