Midjourney

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder. I assemble each score card from dated public evidence and read the community record behind it before a number ships. Last updated 18 August 2026. This page is re-checked monthly and will be re-scored when our V8.1 benchmark run lands.

Midjourney holds two ratings that should not be able to coexist. On Trustpilot it sits at 1.6/5 (366 reviews, read in a browser 12 August 2026). On G2 it holds 4.4/5 across 88 reviews. That is not noise, and it is not review-bombing. The two platforms are scoring two different things: Trustpilot reviewers are mostly judging Midjourney, Inc., the company that charges cards and decides refunds, while G2 reviewers are mostly judging the model, the image generator whose V8.1 became the default on 10 June 2026. This review keeps those two verdicts separate the whole way through, because collapsing them into one number is how a review of Midjourney ends up either gushing or ranting.

One caveat before anything else, and it is about age rather than depth: the capability figure rests on v7-Alpha-era arena data rather than on V8.1, and no vote count was recorded beside that entry. What goes into each of the four dimensions is written out in the methodology, and Midjourney's holes are named where they fall instead of papered over.

Midjourney's score: 77.8/100, and where the complaints are counted

77.8 out of 100 (3.9/5) is the model, the price and the contract, and since 18 August 2026 it is deliberately not a summary of both verdicts above, the consumer record no longer averages into it. The rows were collected 17 June 2026, the arena figure retrieved 23 July 2026, the price read 11 August 2026 and the terms read 12 August 2026. It is a mean of the four rows below and nothing else; no adjustment sits outside the table. Which row carries the complaints has become the wrong question, and the passage under the table says where they went.

Two things about this card changed in August 2026, and the second one is the more useful to a reader. The commercial-terms row used to blend that 1.6/5 consumer rating with a one-word verdict about a contract; it is now built from Midjourney's own paperwork alone. "You own all Assets You create with the Services to the fullest extent possible under applicable law" is the ownership sentence, and the indemnity runs from the user toward Midjourney, which is the norm rather than the exception, of the nineteen vendor documents opened in that sweep, only four pointed any other way.

The second change is where the consumer record does its work, and a third has landed since, in the opposite direction: worth taking slowly, because on this card it moved the headline number nine points. For a period this card published 60, and 60 was not an average of anything: a rating that low on a sample that large was treated as a ceiling clamped over the whole composite, so the fact deciding the headline number sat in no cell a reader could point at. That mechanism is gone, and the reason it went is worth stating plainly on the page it affected most. It was doing two incompatible jobs badly. On some cards it punished the same Trustpilot record twice, once through the ceiling and once inside a row that already read it. On this one it did the opposite: Midjourney's 366 reviews contributed to no cell at all while overriding four that had been measured. Three unrelated products published at exactly 60.0, which is a mechanism's fingerprint rather than a measurement.

That was the second change, and it moved the record into a cell. The third, on 18 August 2026, took it back out (not because 366 unhappy reviews are inconvenient, but because averaging two ratings by head count claims they are one sample, and Trustpilot's own profile says they are not. Re-read on 18 August 2026, that profile shows Trustpilot's own statement about the absence of recent review invitations from this company, with an unprompted stamp sitting on each review the page displays. The G2, Product Hunt and TrustRadius readings were not gathered that way) or at least are not recorded as having been. Two samples drawn differently are not one sample with a bigger n, which is the argument this page has been making since July while going on averaging them anyway.

So the arithmetic changed and the finding did not. Usability is now the 191 favourable readings alone, a raw 90.6 that publishes as 87.8; the 366 Trustpilot reviews are reported on this page, dated, linked and carrying the refund and billing sections below. The other three rows on their own still come to 74.8, exactly as before. With usability in, the composite is 77.8, so the customer record that used to cost about six points is no longer inside the number at all.

That is the sentence on this page a reader should be most suspicious of, so here is the check. The same rule, run the same day, pulled a consumer record out of a sibling card in this category that had been raising its cell, and that card fell two points. The rule cannot see which way a record points; it asks only how the sample was gathered. It also costs something here, and the cost belongs beside the gain: this row now stands on 191 readings where it stood on 557, so it went up while the evidence beneath it got thinner, and the card marks that cell thin. What has not changed is the 1.6/5 itself. It is on this page with its date and its count, in the sections where it decides whether you should hand over a card number.

Two date-stamps matter and must not be blurred. The capability number comes from arena preference data retrieved 23 July 2026, during the v7 Alpha era of that leaderboard. V8.1 became Midjourney's default model on 10 June 2026, and no re-benchmark of it has been run here yet (the section below explains exactly what is and isn't measured). How the four dimensions combine is written out in the methodology. Compressed: a number a reader can take apart is worth more than a number that arrives already decided.

Why is Midjourney rated 1.6 on Trustpilot but 4.4 on G2?

This is the question that brings most people to a Midjourney review in 2026, so here is the direct answer: the ratings diverge because the reviewer populations are judging different entities, and both records are broadly accurate about the thing they measure.

The Product Hunt record leans the same way as G2, and the contrast there is even starker. One reviewer wrote, "Midjourney isn't just an image generator — it feels more like a creative collaborator." (Product Hunt, April 2026, listed as "3mo ago" on 2 July 2026.) The people who love Midjourney are describing the model. The people who give it one star are, overwhelmingly, describing an invoice.

One more wrinkle for readers comparing numbers across this page: until 12 August 2026 it carried two different counts, 359 on the score card and 362 in the prose, and neither had a saved copy of the profile behind it. Both are retired. Every consumer-trust figure above now comes from one browser read of that profile on 12 August 2026, 1.6 out of 5 across 366 reviews, with the capture kept on file. The rating did not move through any of that; only the count did, which is what a live aggregate looks like. Of those 366, Trustpilot places 103 in the last twelve months, and its own distribution runs 77% at one star against 10% at five.

What do Midjourney users complain about most?

Before scoring this page I read the community record end to end: the Trustpilot profile, the r/midjourney refund and moderation threads, Hacker News, Product Hunt. It is an unusual body of evidence in that the complaints barely overlap with the praise. Almost nobody says the images are bad and the billing is fine; the anger and the affection point at different targets, which is the rating split again, visible one review at a time. Five themes carry most of the volume (synthesis dated 2 July 2026).

Billing and the 20-GPU-minute wall. This is the loudest theme by a distance, and it is aimed at Midjourney, Inc. A subscriber who asked for a refund after deciding to stop using the service was refused on GPU-minute grounds and offered credit instead: "Instead of flexibility or support, they offered account credit, which is pretty useless if I don't plan to come back." (Reddit r/midjourney, posted 11 April 2025.) What makes that thread worth reading rather than merely counting is the reply. An account identifying itself as working across Midjourney's billing, fraud and trust-and-safety teams answered in public, linked the vendor's own refund article, and set out a one-month grace period on yearly subscriptions along with the accounting reason the company gives for not reversing older charges. The company does answer some complaints, in the open and at length; the record below is about where it does not. The darkest version of the complaint comes from Trustpilot: "They literally have incentives to make bad images so they can deny refunds in bulk." (Trustpilot 1-star review, 6 May 2026.) That last claim is an accusation, not an established fact, but the incentive structure it describes is real and covered in the refund section below.

"Hasn't kept up" since V7. The V7 launch in April 2025 drew a visible backlash aimed at the model rather than the company. By mid-2026 the cooler version of that take reads as conventional wisdom on Hacker News: "Unfortunately it hasn't kept up on image quality, detail, or text rendering." (Hacker News, 22 June 2026.) A Trustpilot reviewer put it more plainly: "A lot of other AI improve their features very fast but not midjourney." (Trustpilot 1-star review, 28 June 2026.)

The aesthetic is still why people stay. The same Hacker News comment that says the model hasn't kept up also concedes: "MidJourney has better style than most other image generators, especially for artistic images." (Hacker News, 22 June 2026.) That internal contradiction, capability and aesthetics moving in opposite directions inside a single reviewer's head, is the most honest summary of the model's 2026 position that I found anywhere.

Prompt adherence is weak, and iteration is the tax. "The Midjourney AI will OFTEN just ignore clear direct prompts and do its own thing…" (Trustpilot 1-star review, 4 May 2026.) "getting the AI to output something worthwhile would usually take me hours of iterating over a prompt" (Hacker News, 28 June 2026.) On a metered plan this is a pricing problem wearing a workflow costume, and it is why the pricing section below counts GPU hours rather than dollars.

Moderation and suspensions. A distinct grievance from billing, and again aimed at the company: "…without using it for a sec I got a message that my account is suspended due to automation, bot or third party." (Trustpilot 1-star review, 20 May 2026.) Paid accounts suspended without a human support channel to appeal to is a recurring 2026 pattern in the record.

Worth noting: even quality verdicts split by workflow. A 28 May 2026 Trustpilot review calls the output "extremely inconsistent and nowhere near the level people hype it up to be" while a 18 May 2026 five-star review from an artist calls it "excellent for an artist". One-shot prompters leave angry; iterate-and-edit users leave happy.

Is Midjourney V8.1 tested here yet? What the score covers

Honesty checkpoint: we have not yet run our hands-on V8.1 test battery. What this page can currently stand behind is the Artificial Analysis Image Arena preference data, retrieved 23 July 2026 during the v7 Alpha era, ELO 1065, plus the review-aggregate and pricing inputs on the score card. Any sentence on this page about V8.1 output quality would be invented, so there aren't any.

The planned battery targets the exact claims the community record raises: whether V8.1 follows explicit instructions better than the V7-era complaints suggest, whether hands and anatomy regressions are fixed, whether text inside images is still weak, and what a usable image actually costs on a metered Basic plan once retries are counted. Until those runs are published here, treat every capability statement on this page as dated 23 July 2026 and pre-V8.1. When they land, this page's modified date and score will change with them.

A note on video, since Midjourney sells that too. Midjourney, Inc. launched its V1 video model in June 2025; it animates a still image into short clips, priced at launch at roughly eight times the GPU time of an image job: real meter math on a Basic plan. This review scores the image model only: we have not tested video, and nothing here about it comes from measured data (stated 2 July 2026).

How much does Midjourney cost? Four plans and the GPU-hour meter

Midjourney, Inc. sells four subscription tiers. There is no free tier of any kind. The figures below were read on 11 August 2026 from the vendor's own "Comparing Midjourney Plans" documentation article, which is where the public price of record sits: midjourney.com/pricing returns a 404 ("This page has not been /imagine'd yet.") and the in-product plan page is behind a login. That article publishes both bases in one table, so there is no billing toggle to mis-read, and the annual column is what produces the from-$8 figure quoted elsewhere. Midjourney labels $96 a year as "($8 / month)" itself. The Value row on the card above is built on the $10 month-to-month figure, not the $8 one: a buyer who has not committed a year pays $10, and pricing the annual rate instead would flatter every vendor that sells one.

Does Midjourney have a free trial?

No. Midjourney, Inc. removed the free trial in March 2023 and has not restored it (checked 2 July 2026). Several pages that come up alongside this review still imply otherwise; they are out of date. The only escape hatch is the refund window covered in the next section, and it closes at 20 lifetime GPU minutes. The same goes for the "get Midjourney for free" methods promoted elsewhere: they are pre-2023 leftovers or workarounds that risk the account suspensions described above, and if free is a hard requirement, the free-tier alternative in the category ranking at the end of this page is the honest answer.

The number that matters on the cheapest plan is not $10, it is 3.3 GPU hours. Every generation and every retry draws that meter down, and the community record above says retries are the normal workflow, not the exception. A prompt that takes six attempts to land costs six attempts' worth of metered time, which is why a subscriber who prompts one-shot style can burn through a Basic month while feeling like they barely used the product. If you are budgeting, budget in GPU hours and assume an iteration loop; the honest unit of cost here is the usable image, not the month.

That iteration tax is why one widely repeated claim deserves a correction. Reviews that come up alongside this page quote Basic as good for roughly 200 images a month (checked 2 July 2026), a figure that counts every generation as a keeper. The community record says users "often need to try multiple times to get what they want" (Product Hunt review, May 2026, listed as "2mo ago" on 2 July 2026), and every retry draws the same meter, so the usable-image count on a Basic month lands well below 200. How far below is what the V8.1 cost-per-usable-image run will measure; until then, this page publishes no per-image figure at all rather than repeat an uncorrected one.

Two paper facts that don't fit the table. Stealth Mode, which keeps your generations out of the public gallery, is a Pro and Mega feature only; on Basic and Standard, everything you make is publicly visible, which matters more than it sounds if you produce client work. And there is no public API: developers evaluating programmatic image generation should look elsewhere in our image-generators table, because Midjourney's product surfaces are the web app and Discord, full stop.

One practical note on those two surfaces: the web app at midjourney.com is now the primary way to generate and manage images; Discord still works but is optional, a holdover from when it was the only way in (web access opened to all users in August 2024). Subscribing happens on the midjourney.com account page, the same page, as the next section covers, where you cancel.

How do you cancel Midjourney, and can you get a refund?

This section comes before any purchase advice on purpose. If you remember one operational fact about Midjourney, Inc., make it this one: refunds are only granted to accounts that have used fewer than 20 GPU minutes, measured over the lifetime of the account. Not per billing cycle. Lifetime. On a Basic plan, 20 minutes is roughly a tenth of one month's allowance; most people cross the line during their first session, before they know the line exists. That single policy, colliding with auto-renewal, generates the plurality of the 1.6/5 record (366 reviews, read 12 August 2026): surprise annual charges, renewals users say they never approved, and refund requests denied on GPU-minute grounds, with billing email support described as slow or unresponsive through spring 2025 and beyond.

The mechanics, stated plainly. Subscriptions renew automatically, monthly or annually, until cancelled. Cancellation happens from the account page on midjourney.com and takes effect at the end of the current billing period; it does not trigger a refund of that period. If you charged an annual plan by mistake and have already generated images, the written policy says you are past the refund line. Whether support makes exceptions is not something the record supports counting on.

Practical consequences if you subscribe anyway: pay monthly, not annually, until you are certain the tool has a place in your work; set a calendar reminder for the renewal date the day you subscribe; and treat your first 20 GPU minutes as the only trial you will ever get, because functionally, that is what they are.

Can you use Midjourney images commercially? License, copyright and the $1M rule

Three separate legal questions get blurred into can I use this commercially?, and they have three separate answers. All judgments in this section concern Midjourney, Inc.'s terms, not the model.

First, the usage license. Paid subscribers get broad rights to use their generations commercially under Midjourney's terms of service. But there is a revenue line: companies grossing more than $1M per year are required to subscribe to Pro or Mega for commercial use. A solo creator on Basic is inside the rules; an agency that lands a big client may quietly no longer be.

Second, copyright, which is not the same thing. A license from Midjourney, Inc. tells you what the company permits. It cannot manufacture copyright: the U.S. Copyright Office has repeatedly declined registration for purely AI-generated images, which means work you make with Midjourney may be legal to sell yet impossible to protect from copying. For logos and brand assets, that distinction is the whole ballgame, and no subscription tier changes it.

Third, the lawsuit overhang. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, Inc. over copyright in June 2025, and in February 2026 the company changed its terms of service in the shadow of that case. What the terms read on 12 August 2026 do not contain is an indemnity pointing at you: the clause runs the other way, user toward vendor, and that direction is the 50 inside the commercial-terms row on the card. If a client is ever challenged over an image you delivered, that risk stays where the contract leaves it. This is the standing shape of the category rather than something particular to this vendor, and the comparison usually reached for makes the point: Adobe Firefly, routinely named as the legally safe alternative, carries the same one-way clause in the document governing its consumer plan, and the enterprise agreement widely reported to run the other way could not be retrieved on the day we looked.

Is Midjourney worth it in 2026, and who should skip it?

A conditional answer, dated 2 July 2026. If your work rewards a strong default aesthetic, you already work iteratively, and you can absorb a metered retry loop on a Standard plan, the model's output still earns its reputation, and the arena data (v7-Alpha era, retrieved 23 July 2026) backs that. If any item on the list below describes you, the current evidence says walk away.

Skip Midjourney if you are:

1. A one-shot prompter on a budget, because weak prompt adherence plus 3.3 metered GPU hours on Basic is a cost trap documented across three review platforms.
2. A team lead who needs a vendor-side indemnity, because the terms read 12 August 2026 point the clause the other way and no tier on the ladder changes it.
3. Someone whose images need reliable text rendering, a weakness the community record flags as of mid-2026 and which we will re-test on V8.1.
4. A developer needing an API, because there is no public one.
5. A refund-sensitive subscriber, because the 20-GPU-minute lifetime rule plus the 1.6/5 (366 reviews, read 12 August 2026) billing record is exactly the combination that fills Trustpilot.

And if you cannot use a Discord- or web-only workflow, nothing here will change that constraint.

Midjourney alternatives: how it scores against Krea, Ideogram and Leonardo

Every sibling below runs on the identical four rows, and all five composites were re-read from their own cards on 18 August 2026, the day the usability rows stopped averaging consumer samples that were not gathered the same way; the scored image-generators table lines them all up in one place. What travels with each number here is the sample or the clause underneath it, because that is what decides how much weight the figure will bear. The one-line differences:

• Ideogram, 75.6/100 (re-read 18 August 2026) (the one card that fell that day, by 0.2, when a single review sample it had been counting twice was counted once) and it is built around the thing Midjourney's reviewers flag most: words rendered inside the frame, spelled correctly.
• Adobe Firefly, at 76.3/100 (re-read 18 August 2026), trades some aesthetic ceiling for a document you can open and quote: its terms say the output is yours and permit commercial use of non-beta free-plan output. On the indemnity itself it points the same way Midjourney's does.
• Leonardo AI, at 75.7/100 (re-read 18 August 2026, down two points that day (it is the sibling whose record left its cell while raising it), is the cost-control alternative, with a free tier where Midjourney has none), though on the terms read that day, ownership of free-tier output vests in Leonardo rather than the person who prompted it, which is a trade Midjourney's paid-only ladder does not ask you to make.
• Krea, at 76.3/100 (re-read 18 August 2026, unmoved), earns its number on a realtime canvas rather than the queue-and-retry loop Midjourney runs on, and its usability cell converts 13 reviews, a thin sample that the card states rather than smooths.
• Recraft, at 82.7/100 (re-read 18 August 2026, unmoved), targets vector and brand-asset output, a lane Midjourney does not seriously contest, and it publishes an EU/UK cooling-off window in its own terms where Midjourney's refund route is the 20-GPU-minute rule described above.

Midjourney's 77.8/100 now sits above most of the composites listed above, and it did not get there by making better pictures: capability at 64.3 is the lowest row on its own card and has not moved since July. It got there on 18 August 2026, when 366 consumer reviews left its usability row. Set that row aside and the other three still come to 74.8, exactly as they did before: what moved is which readings the fourth row is built from, not the product. The category page puts these cards in composite order on the day you read it; this list is a set of one-line differences, not a placing.

The closing verdict follows the page's own split. The model remains a genuinely strong image generator with the category's most recognizable aesthetic, weighed down by capability questions that only a V8.1 re-test can settle. Midjourney, Inc. runs a billing and support operation that has earned its 1.6/5 (366 reviews, read 12 August 2026) and shows no public sign of fixing it. Our 77.8/100 is the first of those two facts and not the second, which is the point rather than an omission: the 366 unhappy reviews are reported on this page with their date and their count, beside a refund rule you can check before you pay, instead of being averaged into a comfortable middle with 191 people who were reviewing something else. A reader who wants one number that settles both will not find it here, because the evidence does not make one.