Midjourney

Midjourney started as a Discord bot in 2022. Since then it's added a full web interface, video generation, and tools for keeping a consistent visual style across many images — Style References, Personalization, and the Edit Model.

Midjourney's current default model is V8.2 (released July 24, 2026). V8.2 replaced three older, separate tools — Omni Reference, Character Reference, and Retexture — with a single Edit Model. If you've read older Midjourney guides that describe those three as separate features, that's now out of date.

Midjourney is subscription-only. There's no free tier and no free trial — you need a paid plan to generate anything.

You write a prompt describing what you want, and Midjourney generates four image variations. From there you can upscale one, generate more variations of it, or edit it further. The same idea extends to video: Midjourney turns a still image into a 5-second video, extendable up to 21 seconds.

Two features become especially useful once you start doing more than basic prompts:

Midjourney is widely used for photorealistic-looking images, and its current models can produce detailed lighting, skin texture, and material rendering. Results still vary by prompt, and complex hands and poses can still produce errors — "closely matches real-world photography" is a description of typical results, not a guarantee on every generation.

Midjourney has a full web interface at midjourney.com, separate from the original Discord bot. It includes a dashboard, an Explore feed (public community generations, searchable — you can see the exact prompt and parameters behind any public image), a Create tab, an archive of your past generations, and a canvas-style editor.

Discord is still supported for people who prefer it, but it's no longer required — the web app covers full generation and editing. Draft Mode trades image quality for speed, useful for testing prompt directions quickly before committing GPU time to a full-quality render.

Moodboards let you collect reference images to define a visual direction — color palette, lighting, composition — before generating anything. Useful for teams aligning on a look before production starts, rather than iterating on individual prompts one at a time.

Midjourney is useful for people creating visual concepts and working with a consistent style:

G2 currently lists Midjourney at 4.4/5 from 102 reviews.

Midjourney's Terms generally give subscribers ownership of content they create, subject to a couple of specific exceptions:

• If your company makes more than $1,000,000 USD a year in revenue, you (or your employer) need a Pro or Mega plan to own what you create.
• If you upscale someone else's image, that image stays owned by its original creator.

By default, everything you generate is public and can be remixed by other users — Midjourney's Terms grant Midjourney a broad license to display and reuse what you create. Stealth mode (Pro and Mega only) keeps your generations private and out of the public feed. Even with Stealth mode on, anything you generate in a shared space like a Discord server is visible to everyone in that server.

We checked Midjourney's own documentation (subscription plans, parameter list, video generation costs, and Terms of Service) and its G2 reviews page when preparing this review. We update this page as Midjourney's pricing, models, or features change — its V8.2 update in July 2026 changed how several older reference tools work, so we've flagged that clearly above.

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