DALL-E 2 FREE & FREE TRIAL Alternatives! Best Text to Image AI & Midjourney is PUBLIC!

Text-to-image AI access is widening fast, and a handful of tools are now either free, free-trial, or effectively public—making it possible to get high-quality results without paying for the most famous names. The standout theme is that “best” depends less on raw image quality and more on what each model does well: Midjourney’s artistic color and composition, DALL·E 2’s coherence and upscaling, and several open/free alternatives that can produce surprisingly usable images (and sometimes near-photographic text).

A key practical insight comes from comparing Midjourney and DALL·E 2. Midjourney can generate strong outlines and creative “taste,” but it can fall short on coherence—especially when details don’t fully lock together. DALL·E 2 can then take Midjourney’s rough structure and enhance it into a more finished, higher-quality result. Examples include a cute creature in an alleyway where DALL·E 2 adds clarity, and a frog image where Midjourney produced a deformed frog but DALL·E 2 recognized it as a frog and remade it in higher quality. The takeaway: using Midjourney for style and composition, then DALL·E 2 for refinement, can outperform relying on either model alone.

From there, the list ranks nine text-to-image options, mostly emphasizing free or public access. NightCafe is positioned as a strong VQGAN-based option with high coherence, easy controls, high-resolution outputs, and a community/discovery angle via Discord—though it’s placed near the bottom of the list because Midjourney is still viewed as better overall. Crayon (formerly DALL·E mini) is described as fast and easy, with improving updates, but it’s also flagged for long wait times and server access issues after popularity surged; it also lacks strict content filtering, which can lead to “tasteless” outputs.

Latin diffusion is highlighted as completely free and unusually strong at generating text—so strong that it’s claimed to be better than most competitors for typography, while still producing coherent art overall. It does include an NSFW filter, described as stricter than Crayon but looser than DALL·E 2. Another free route is a DALL·E flow variant that runs in Google Colab, producing DALL·E 2–sized, highly upscaled images; it’s described as more coherent than Crayon and potentially with minimal content filtering. Mind’s Eye beta (from multimodal art) also starts in Google Colab but moves into a dedicated interface with options like Latin diffusion, VQGAN, and upscaling methods, plus the ability to run locally.

Midjourney itself is treated as the major creative benchmark: it’s moved into open beta with a free trial, uses a Discord-based workflow (including /imagine prompts and aspect-ratio commands), and generates four images per prompt with upscaling/variation options. ShonenCove AI is placed above Midjourney in the tiering, described as a 12 billion parameter model with extremely coherent, camera-like results and no content filter—but it requires translating prompts into Russian and runs through Discord with a limited daily prompt allowance.

At the top end sits DALL·E 2, still framed as the “holy grail” for public access, with OpenAI reportedly working on pricing before broader release. Finally, Google’s “party” (spelled as “party” in the transcript) is presented as a massive 20 billion parameter system that produces clear, well-formed text and high-resolution images with few failures—though release timing remains uncertain. Overall, the practical message is clear: free access is now good enough to experiment widely, and combining tools (especially Midjourney for style plus DALL·E 2 for coherence) can yield the most reliable results.