Midjourney Review

The image generator that set the aesthetic default for the whole category, launched into open beta on 12 July 2022 and still shipping, with version 8.2 released on 24 July 2026. It began as a Discord bot and mostly stayed one culturally, though the web interface added in August 2024 alongside version 6.1 is now the more common way in. Unlike most of this list it is not a general assistant and has no context window in any meaningful sense: you write a prompt, optionally attach reference images, and adjust with parameters for aspect ratio, stylization and variation strength.

What has kept it ahead is a house style, a strong opinion about composition, lighting and colour that produces a usable image from a lazy prompt more reliably than technically comparable models manage. Subscriptions start around $10 a month, with higher tiers buying faster GPU time and concurrency rather than better output. This grade is a provisional placeholder pending hands-on testing.