Stable Diffusion

Free tier

Platforms: web, mac, windows, linux, api | Last verified: 2026-04-12

Features

*SDXL, SD 3.5, and community checkpoints via ComfyUI or Automatic1111 interfaces
*LoRA fine-tuning — load character or style LoRAs on top of any base model with a few grams of VRAM
*ControlNet for pose, depth, and edge-guided generation — output follows a skeleton or sketch exactly
*img2img and inpainting built into every major UI — redraw any region with a mask
*No content policy enforcement when running locally — the model does what the prompt says
*ComfyUI node-based workflow editor for chaining models, ControlNets, upscalers, and custom scripts

Pricing

Free: Fully open source — run locally on your own hardware at no cost

DreamStudio Credits$10/one-time

Strengths

+Running locally means zero per-image cost after hardware — a 3090 can generate 200+ images in an afternoon for free
+The LoRA and checkpoint ecosystem on CivitAI is enormous — there are fine-tuned models for virtually every art style, character, and subject matter imaginable
+ComfyUI workflows are reproducible and shareable — you can download someone's entire pipeline as a JSON and run it with one click
+No content restrictions locally, which matters for commercial illustration work that would get flagged on hosted platforms

Limitations

-Getting a good setup running (CUDA, Python, model downloads) takes a few hours if you haven't done it before — there's no magic install button
-Raw image quality on the base SDXL model is visibly behind Midjourney V6 for photorealism — you need the right checkpoint and LoRAs to close the gap
-Prompt syntax differs between interfaces and model versions — what works in A1111 may not transfer to ComfyUI without adjustment
-Without a good GPU (at minimum a 10-series Nvidia with 8GB VRAM), local generation is painfully slow — CPU mode can take 10+ minutes per image

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