Midjourney: our review

Midjourney started on Discord before building its own site, and its core idea hasn't changed since: describe an image in a few words, the tool composes it. There's no template to fill in and no layer to adjust like in a layout program — the result carries Midjourney's visual signature more than a precise command. For an SME that wants to illustrate an article or build a moodboard, this recognisable aesthetic is an asset if it fits the brand identity, an obstacle if it doesn't.

A subscription from the very first image

Midjourney offers no free trial on its site or on Discord: the subscription starts with the first generation. Four tiers exist, from Basic at $10 a month to Mega at $120, each with a growing volume of fast GPU hours and, from the Pro plan onward, a Stealth mode that removes creations from the site's public visibility. A team training on these generators through our AI training needs to factor this recurring cost into its budget from the start, with no trial period to check whether the style fits.

Who owns the image, and how far that goes

This is the question that matters for an SME before building a campaign on it. Midjourney's terms of service are direct: you own the images you create, even after cancelling your subscription. Two limits come with that. The first affects companies with more than one million dollars in annual revenue: they must subscribe to a Pro or Mega plan to keep that ownership right, otherwise commercial use of their own images is no longer covered. The second concerns recycling: if you upscale an image published by another user, that image stays the property of its original creator, not yours. A real estate agency generating mood visuals for its listings stays within the rules as long as it produces its own images and doesn't cross that revenue threshold.

What limits business use

Two reservations are worth knowing before rolling the tool out widely. First, confidentiality: Midjourney describes itself as an open community, and any creation published on the site is by default visible and remixable by other users — a visual produced ahead of a campaign launch can therefore be seen and reused by a third party, unless you pay for Stealth mode, reserved for Pro and Mega plans. Second, the licence you grant in return: by using the service, you give Midjourney a perpetual, irrevocable licence to reproduce, republish and distribute your creations, a licence that survives account cancellation. The privacy policy also lists training its algorithms as a covered use of data, with no opt-out button identified in the account settings — unlike Canva, which offers that choice explicitly.

Our recommendation

For a very small business under the million-dollar revenue threshold that wants to produce illustration visuals fast, Midjourney remains hard to beat on value for money. For a visual that must stay confidential before its release, or for a company approaching that revenue threshold, better to check the right subscription tier before committing. Our selection of comparable image generation tools puts this choice in perspective.