The potential and utility of generative AI is increasing every week as companies try to outdo each other. What started with creating sophisticated images from a quick text input has evolved into generating complete movies and animating previously static images.
Still, there are some excellent options for creating AI images from free tools. Recently, OpenAI announced that free users of ChatGPT can create images in DALL-E for the first time, but only two per day.
Others, like the ones on this list, are more generous with their free offerings, but as always, you’ll get more options if you’re willing to open your wallet (you can check out our guide to the best overall AI image generators for that).
Whether you’re looking for a quick image to get some laughs in a group chat or you want to try out a few ideas before committing to a paid plan, here are our recommendations for the best free AI image generation tools.
Overall Best Free AI Image Generator
Not only is Leonardo our pick for the best overall AI image generator, but its generous free tier also makes it an excellent choice for newcomers.
Leonardo offers free plan users a bundle of tokens to use for AI image generation. The free plan has no expiration date, meaning you don’t have to log in after a month or so or keep changing your email address (we’ve all done that).
However, being free is one thing, but that alone is not the reason why Leonardo is worth trying out. While you will need to be a premium subscriber to access certain features, it is still an excellent tool for just about any project.
While it’s slower without paying, and Leonardo.Ai owns the rights to what you create, it’s definitely worth it for a quick image here or there.
Freepik may not be the AI image generation tool that everyone is talking about, but it should be. The app is easy to use, but the free version lets you generate 20 images per day.
That could, if you wanted, be 7,300 free images per year, created from over 140 million stock images and generated quickly.
You can even upscale a few images a day for free if you have the credits, and the flexible payment options mean you can get 7,000 AI credits for just £7 a month, meaning you don’t have to spend all that money on £32 a month if you need more.
Craiyon is a little different from the other options on this list because it’s almost the opposite: the base product is free and the paid tiers are an improvement, rather than the free version being a watered-down version of the product.
Of course, there are some disadvantages too. For example, you have to expect watermarks. While you can pay to remove restrictions like ads and higher priority, you can get 9 images at once for free.
Paid members, of course, help keep the lights on, and it’s worth noting that plans start at just $5 per month. There’s also a handy background removal tool that you can use with no restrictions and no subscription.
Microsoft Copilot Designer offers all the benefits of ChatGPT’s DALL-E 3, but with a free tier that offers plenty of power, allowing 15 image generations per day.
The Premium plan adds additional app integrations within Microsoft 365 and faster performance, but even without paying, it’s an impressive tool – not just for image creation, but also for image adjustment.
Whether you want to pull out specific elements from an image, adjust color saturation, or replace elements entirely, the feature is impressively malleable.
Google’s ImageFX is a free, ground-up AI generation tool based on the new-generation Imagen 3 model. It offers relatively realistic images from a quick text prompt and there are no limitations – so you can be creative to your heart’s content.
Why is it a little further down on this list? From our testing, it’s a simple platform that can only produce square images. This is more of an experiment than a product, but the underlying technology will be integrated into Gemini and other products in the future, so you’ll have a chance to see what’s likely to come soon.
Google may also store your interactions for a year and a half, so that’s something worth considering.
