Stable Diffusion
The open model that democratized AI images.
Olya's profile
- What sets it apart
- The real difference is that the weights are open and downloadable: you can run it on your own machine, offline, without sending anything to a server. The 3.5 family ranges from the 8-billion-parameter Large to the 2.5-billion Medium, the latter built to run on consumer GPUs. Around it has grown an ecosystem — ComfyUI, LoRA, ControlNet — that no closed model lets you touch at that level.
- Strengths
- Control: you can train your own style, steer the composition, wire it into a pipeline. Run locally it's free and the images stay yours. On your own hardware it means privacy and high volume at near-zero marginal cost.
- When to use it
- It pays off when you want to customize — a LoRA on your product or your look — or when you need to work offline and with sensitive data. It's the right call for anyone generating lots of images who wants to keep cost and rights under their own control.
- When to avoid it
- If you want the best aesthetic straight from the prompt, no tinkering, Midjourney gets there faster. No decent GPU or no appetite for a learning curve: use a hosted service. And if your company clears a million in annual revenue, the free license lapses and you need the Enterprise one.