AI is fast at logo concepts and bad at finished logos. Used well it saves a day of exploration; used as a shortcut to delivery it hands the client a raster file nobody can print.
Our pick
GPT Image for concepting — it follows a written brief most closely and renders legible text, which is exactly what a wordmark needs. FLUX (open weights) when you want unlimited iterations and the licence permits your use. Midjourney when raw aesthetic quality matters more than following instructions.
What one job costslower is better
The 1 cheapest of 1 models with a published price. Bars are logarithmic so the cheap end stays readable; every row carries the exact figure.
GPT Image 1
OpenAI · ImageBest-in-class at following a detailed prompt and rendering legible text in an image.
Quality —
FLUX.1 dev
Black Forest Labs · ImageThe open-weights favourite — the most liked image model on Hugging Face. Non-commercial licence on the dev variant; read it before client work.
Quality —
Midjourney
Midjourney · ImageStill the best pure aesthetic quality out of the box. No free tier, and no real API — it is a subscription product, not infrastructure.
Quality —
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Prices checked hourly against the LiteLLM dataset · last updated 27 minutes ago. API rates, not seat subscriptions. Watching 320 models for new releases.
What this task actually costs
Ten concepts is a realistic first pass. On a per-image API model that is a few dollars; on a seat-based tool it is part of a flat monthly fee. The calculator on each model page shows both.
The catches, out loud
- Output is raster. A logo needs vectorising — AI does not deliver SVG, and a client logo in PNG is a problem waiting to happen.
- Text rendering breaks on long or unusual names; the last letter is the usual casualty.
- Trademark clearance is not something an image model does. Distinctiveness has to be checked by a human.
- Some open-weights licences are non-commercial — check before invoicing for the work.
See also: best AI for product video · all image models.