Midjourney vs Ideogram vs Recraft vs Freepik
Best image, best text, best vectors, or best bundle? Scores from the RXed AI Periodic Table v1.0 — identical 20-element scale, deterministic overall. How we audit →
At a glance
Scope = elements of the AI stack in the tool’s stated scope (dashed = honestly out of scope, never a penalty). Quality = how well it scores on what it covers. No single number — both axes, always.
The verdict
Midjourney (Scope 9/20 · Quality 6/10) still makes the best-looking images in AI and is still a dead end for pipelines: no API, no MCP, automation explicitly against the ToS, plus live copyright-lawsuit risk. Ideogram (Scope 11/20 · Quality 7/10) is the one that renders text correctly — posters, logos, packaging copy — now with open weights, a native MCP server and a $0.03/image API. Recraft (Scope 11/20 · Quality 7/10) is the production-design pick: real SVG vectors, brand styles and a real MCP server at ~€0.03/image. Freepik (Scope 14/20 · Quality 6/10) buys breadth — 30+ third-party models plus a stock library under one subscription — where 'unlimited' covers a rotating subset of models. Hero images by hand → Midjourney. Text and brand assets in agent pipelines → Ideogram or Recraft. Every model under one bill → Freepik.
Where the quality sits
Family mean over covered elements only — a dash means the family is honestly outside that tool’s scope.
| Midjourney Scope 9/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-10 | Ideogram Scope 11/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-24 | Recraft Scope 11/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-21 | Freepik (Magnific) Scope 14/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-25 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Midjourney, Inc. | Ideogram AI Inc. | Recraft, Inc. | Freepik Company S.L.U. (rebranded product name: Magnific) |
| Origin | US | Canada | US | Spain |
| Pricing | No free tier · Basic ~€9 ($10) · Standard ~€28 ($30) · Pro ~€56 ($60) · Mega ~€111 ($120) per month, billed in USD; −20% annual. Extra fast GPU time $4/hr. Pro+ required for companies >$1M revenue and for private (Stealth) generation. | Free (slow credits, public JPG outputs) · Basic ~€6 ($7) · Plus ~€14-18 ($16-20) · Pro ~€44-55 ($48-60) · Team ~€28/user ($30) per month, annual ~20-30% off · API $0.03-0.10 per image (~€0.03-0.09) · Enterprise custom + open-weight self-host commercial license | Free (daily credits; images public, no commercial rights) · Basic ~€11 · Pro ~€18-147 · Teams from ~€20/user per month · API prepaid at $1/1,000 units (≈€0.02-0.28 per image); annual billing ~20% off | Free (20 gens/day, Auto model only) · Premium ~€12.70/mo (~$14.50 annual, 240K credits/yr) · Premium+ ~€29.50/mo (~$33.75 annual, 600K credits/yr + unlimited on ~30 models) · Pro ~€184/mo (~$210 annual, 4M credits/yr) · Business ~€48/seat/mo (~$55 annual, 1.08M shared credits/yr) · Enterprise custom. USD-denominated, annual billing (~25% higher monthly), VAT/local taxes excluded; converted at 1 USD = 0.875 EUR. Verified on freepik.com/pricing 25/07/2026. |
| Pr Prompts | 8 | 8 | 8 | 7 |
| Em Embeddings | — | — | — | — |
| Cx Context | 9 | 8 | 7 | 7 |
| Tr Tracing | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Lg LLM | — | — | — | 3 |
| Fc Function calling | — | 5 | 5 | 7 |
| Vx Vector store | — | — | — | — |
| Rg RAG | — | — | — | 6 |
| Gr Guardrails | 6 | 6 | 7 | 5 |
| Mm Multimodal | 9 | 7 | 9 | 10 |
| Ag Agents | — | 4 | 7 | 7 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | 6 | 8 | 6 | 6 |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 2 | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| Ev Evaluations | — | — | — | — |
| Sm Small models | 7 | 8 | 8 | 6 |
| Ma Multi-agent | — | — | — | 4 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 1 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| In Interpretability | — | — | — | — |
| Th Thinking models | — | — | — | — |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: Midjourney passport → · Ideogram passport → · Recraft passport → · Freepik (Magnific) passport →