The verdict
Midjourney still holds the artistic-quality crown in AI image generation. The V8.1 model — the V7 line became the default in 2025, with V8 following in 2026 — keeps the distinctive painterly look you can identify at a glance, now with sharper photorealism, HD 2K output, and better in-image text than earlier versions. Midjourney also added video: the V1 Video model animates a still image into 5–21 second clips, but it's image-to-video only — there's no text-to-video, so for prompt-to-video work Kling or Sora are the better starting point. On pricing, be clear-eyed: there's no free tier and no standing free trial, and plans run from $10/month (Basic) to $120/month (Mega), with the faster GPU hours and stealth mode gated to the higher tiers. The Discord-first workflow remains polarizing — the web app helps but doesn't fully replace it — and text rendering still trails Ideogram for typography-heavy work. If the brief is illustration, concept art, or mood-board work where taste matters more than exact layout control, we'd still pay the $10 minimum to evaluate Midjourney first. If you need readable text, exact product geometry, true text-to-video, or a genuinely free path, start with Ideogram, FLUX, or a free generator instead.