Tool review

Midjourney

Earned listing · No vendor relationship

Reviewed Sep 2026 · Every claim sourced · Category: marketing content & design

Straight verdict: use it for the best image quality in the category — V8.2 is a full editor with learned personal style and five-times-faster generation — with eyes open: everything you generate is public and remixable by default, your prompts and uploads are licensed to Midjourney permanently and irrevocably, and there is no training opt-out at any price. If your work is confidential, keep it out of Midjourney entirely — Stealth Mode is a best-efforts promise, not privacy.

Data

Where does your data go?

Midjourney's servers and Discord's — a two-company architecture, public by default:

Everything is public unless you pay to hide it. The terms are explicit: content posted in public settings is "publicly viewable and remixable" by default. The docs go further — creations can surface on the public Explore page even when generated in private Discord servers or bot direct messages. Only Stealth Mode (Pro, $60/mo; Mega, $120/mo) keeps generations off the site's public surfaces.
You grant a perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable license over prompts, uploads, and outputs — surviving termination. Stealth Mode does not undo this license: it controls what other users see, not what Midjourney may do with your content.
No training opt-out exists at any tier. The privacy policy states on its face that it covers data "collected through the process of training Midjourney machine learning algorithms," and the published documents describe no user-facing opt-out — a contrast with OpenAI's and Anthropic's published opt-outs. Prompts, uploaded photos, videos, documents, and messages are all enumerated as personal data.
Prompts including spoken input are collected, and the policy covers data from third-party sources including "the public internet."
Discord holds the other copy. The architecture splits your data between two companies; deleting your Midjourney account does not reach Discord's copy, nor the license you already granted.
Advertising cookies are conceded as a possible CCPA "share" — opt-out buried in Privacy Settings.

Translate it: exposure is the product. Every prompt, upload, and generation is licensed to Midjourney forever, public by default, and trainable on — the only way to keep something out is to never put it in.

Reliability

What happens when it's wrong?

Midjourney publishes no accuracy claims to audit — its failure modes are creative rather than factual:

Image quality is the category benchmark — the strongest photorealistic and stylistic output of the tools reviewed (the Canva listing's own benchmark scored Midjourney 7.5/10 against Magic Media's 5.2).
The known failure surface is copyright, not hallucination. Disney, NBCUniversal, and DreamWorks are suing over training and outputs that reproduce their characters; the artists' case has Midjourney as a named defendant with active discovery into 2026. No merits ruling has issued against Midjourney as of this review — these are allegations and defenses, not findings.
Practical consequence for owners: the US Copyright Office's position (Jan 2025) is that purely prompt-generated images may carry no copyright. Midjourney's ToS "ownership" grant is a contract between you and Midjourney — it cannot conjure copyright that federal law withholds. Client deliverables may be unprotected work.
Prompt leakage is real: prompts travel with images on community surfaces — a prompt describing something personal is exposed along with the picture.

Practical rule: world-class output, worst-in-class data posture. Generate concepts and public-facing content; keep unreleased products, client NDA material, and personal references out entirely. See the glossary for every term these reviews use.

Limits

What's it actually bad at?

Privacy architecture is the worst among mainstream AI services — Terms.Law's Privacy Watchdog scored it 38/100 (Grade D), the lowest of any AI service reviewed; the ToS scored 42/100 (C-), tied for lowest. The structural finding: "exposure is the product."
Stealth Mode is narrower than it sounds. It's a best-efforts non-publication promise confined to midjourney.com — generations made in shared Discord channels stay visible even with Stealth engaged, and the perpetual license applies regardless.
Six-figure companies are forced up the ladder. Businesses earning over $1M/year gross must be on Pro or Mega for commercial use — the revenue condition is written into the ownership terms.
Enforcement asymmetry: suspension or ban "at any time, for any reason," no refund for the current period, liability capped at 12 months' fees with no dollar floor, indemnification running user-to-company, and mandatory arbitration in Santa Clara County.
No free tier, no trial — removed March 2023. The cheapest way to test is $10.

Cost

What does it cost really?

Basic

$10/mo

~3.3 Fast GPU hours — about 200 images, no Relax mode. When the hours are gone, you're done until the reset or $4/hour add-ons.

Standard

$30/mo

15 Fast hours + unlimited Relax images. Where most serious users belong. Still public-by-default, still no Stealth.

Pro / Mega

$60 / $120

Stealth Mode, 30–60 Fast hours, unlimited Relax video, 12 concurrent jobs. Required for companies earning over $1M/year.

The traps: pricing is really GPU-time pricing — Fast hours don't roll over, video consumes roughly 8 minutes per prompt, and Turbo mode burns 2x per image. Annual billing (20% off) is paid entirely upfront. Stealth Mode doesn't retroactively privatize old work — manual, one image at a time. The honest value assessment: the pricing is clean and the tiers make sense — better than most AI vendors manage. The problem isn't the ladder; it's what's on the other side of it.

Impact

What does it replace — and what do you still do?

It replaces stock photography budgets and concept-illustration hours — the fastest path from description to finished visual, with style control nothing else at this price point matches. You still own: the prompt craft (the skill that makes it work), legal review of anything client-facing (the copyright question is unresolved), and the judgment about what never enters the system. Midjourney generates; it does not protect.

Platform

What the ecosystem offers

V8.2 (the current model) is a full editor, not just a generator: edit any image with plain instructions, fix or extend parts of a picture, and blend up to four reference images into one result. It can also learn your personal style from images you rate, then apply it to everything you make.
Speed and quality moved: generation runs roughly five times faster than last year's model; 2K high-resolution rendering is built in; and the old weakness — unreadable text inside images — is now fixed when you put the text in quotes.
The interface caught up: voice-driven editing, a proper image editor, mobile web, and weekly updates. What started as a Discord bot is now a design tool with a shipping schedule.
Video: turn any image into a short video, on Standard plan and up.
The honest tension: the product evolves weekly; the data terms haven't moved. Same perpetual license, same public-by-default, same no-opt-out.

Exit

If I stop paying, what do I lose?

Export: your images are yours to keep — you own the Assets you generated (subject to the copyright question above), and anything generated while subscribed stays licensed for your use.
The license you granted is the real exit: perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable — it survives termination. Stealth Mode on past generations doesn't undo it. Deleting your account doesn't undo it.
Downgrade cliff: drop below Pro and Stealth Mode ends — everything becomes public and remixable again going forward.
Cancellation is self-serve and clean — auto-renewal can be set to cancel anytime, and the no-refund-for-current-period rule is standard for the category.
The lock-in reality: the workflow lock is prompt libraries and community integrations — but the deeper lock is that the license you granted never ends.

Fit

Who is this NOT for?

Anyone handling confidential work — unreleased products, NDA-covered references, client PII. The public-by-default architecture and the absence of a training opt-out make Midjourney structurally incompatible with confidential input. Also not for businesses needing documented rights chains for commercial output — the unresolved copyright status of prompt-generated images plus the studio lawsuits make legal review mandatory. And not for anyone unwilling to treat every prompt as public.

David's take — Midjourney is the best image generator in its category and the worst data citizen, and both halves are documented rather than alleged. The output is the category benchmark. The terms are the deepest hole: everything public and remixable by default, a perpetual irrevocable license over your prompts and uploads, no training opt-out at any price, a privacy grade of D — the lowest of any AI service measured — and a revenue threshold that forces successful companies into the privacy tier they needed from day one. This is the review where the rule about treating every prompt as public stops being advice and becomes the operating manual. If you generate marketing concepts and public-facing visuals, Midjourney is worth the $30 — genuinely. If anything you'd prompt is confidential, the tool to use is no tool: keep it out entirely, because the license never ends and Stealth Mode was never designed to protect you. The honest framing: you're not the customer of a private studio; you're a contributor to a public gallery that pays you in output.