Stable Diffusion

Open image models you can run, tune and control yourself.

About

Stable Diffusion is a family of open image models from Stability AI that you can run on your own computer or call through a pay-as-you-go API. That openness is the whole point: you can choose the model, fine-tune it, plug in community extensions, and generate without sending every prompt to a closed service. The trade-off is effort, since setup, hardware and prompt craft all matter more than with a polished consumer app.

Key features

• Open-weight models you can run locally on suitable hardware
• A pay-as-you-go API with models tuned for speed, quality or cost
• Editing tools including inpainting, outpainting and background removal
• Guidance tools that use a sketch, structure or style reference to steer results
• Upscalers for turning low-resolution outputs into sharper images
• Community checkpoints, fine-tuning and extensions for specialised looks
• Local processing for privacy, with no need to upload images to a cloud service

Pricing

API pay as you go: 1 credit = $0.01; Stable Image Core 3 credits ($0.03), Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large 6.5 credits ($0.065) per image

Prices change — check the official pricing page before buying credits.

Best for

Developers, tinkerers and high-volume creators who want control, privacy and no per-image subscription.

Limitations to know

Generated images can contain artifacts, garbled text or anatomy errors, so check outputs carefully, especially hands, faces and wording. Commercial-use rights depend on the licence for the specific model and on the size of the organisation using it, so confirm the licence terms before commercial use, and note that quality varies a lot with the model, interface and settings chosen.

What users like

• Open, customisable models that can be run locally and fine-tuned
• Low long-term cost for frequent generation once set up
• High-quality, detailed results when prompts and settings are right
• A large community sharing models, extensions and guidance

What users complain about

• Setup feeling technical and intimidating, especially for beginners
• Slow local generation without a capable graphics card
• Prompt quality mattering a lot, with vague prompts giving weak results
• Interfaces feeling less polished than commercial alternatives

Our editorial score

Our editorial score: 8.7/10 — our own judgement, not an aggregate of user ratings. See the full review for the reasoning.

Read the full Stable Diffusion review · More Image Generation tools · All AI tools

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