Midjourney alternatives that keep your images out of a public feed

The Morse teamPublished October 25, 2026Facts checked October 22, 202610 min read

The best Midjourney alternative for privacy is one that doesn't publish your pictures by default. As of October 2026, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, Gemini, and ComfyUI running on your own computer keep your images out of a public feed, Morse's Studio stores them encrypted in your browser, and Leonardo and Ideogram, like Midjourney, make privacy a paid feature. Midjourney's own terms say "By default, Your Content is publicly viewable and remixable," and the Stealth Mode that hides it costs $60 a month.

We read Midjourney's plans page, Stealth Mode article, terms of service, privacy policy, and community guidelines on October 22, 2026, then each alternative's own pricing, privacy, and help pages the same day. Midjourney earns credit in one place: its privacy policy says that if it gets a law enforcement request for your data, it will "promptly notify You and provide You with a copy of the request, unless We are legally prohibited from doing so." Neither Leonardo's nor Ideogram's privacy policy makes that promise.

The short list

As of October 22, 2026. Each cell comes from the pages linked in that app's section below.

Are Midjourney images public?

Yes, unless you pay for Stealth Mode and switch it on. Midjourney's help page on keeping creations private says it "thrives as an open-by-default community, which means that every image and video you create can potentially be found on the Explore page," and that this "includes images made in private Discord servers or direct messages with the Midjourney Bot" (Midjourney). When we loaded the Explore page on October 22, 2026 without signing in, it showed creators' usernames beside their work.

The terms, in the version effective May 27, 2026, make the default a license. "Midjourney is an open community which allows others to use and remix Your Content whenever they are posted in a public setting. By default, Your Content is publicly viewable and remixable" (Midjourney). Deleting doesn't undo it either. The Stealth Mode page warns that trashed creations "may still be found on the Explore page, in ranking, or by using the job ID or creation URL" (Midjourney).

Which Midjourney plans have Stealth Mode?

Only Pro and Mega. Midjourney's plans page lists Basic at $10 a month, Standard at $30, Pro at $60, and Mega at $120, with 20% off for paying a year upfront, and says Stealth Mode "is only available on the Pro and Mega Plans" (Midjourney). So the cheapest private Midjourney is $576 a year.

Stealth has three limits, all from Midjourney's own pages. It covers the website, not Discord: "any creations made in public channels on Discord are still visible to others." Turning it on doesn't hide what you already made; the Stealth Mode page says you have to make earlier images private by hand. And the terms promise only that Midjourney will "make best efforts not to publish" your stealth images.

Does Midjourney train on your prompts?

Its pages don't say so plainly, and we found no setting to opt out. The terms give Midjourney "a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license" to reproduce, adapt, display, and distribute both your prompts and the images you make, and that license "survives termination." The privacy policy, last updated September 3, 2026, says it covers "data collected through the process of training Midjourney machine learning algorithms," and lists among what it collects your prompts, "including text, images, and those generated from spoken input" (Midjourney).

The terms also set a business rule. A company, or an employee of one, with more than $1,000,000 a year in revenue "must be subscribed to a 'Pro' or 'Mega' plan to own Your Assets." For a business over that line, privacy and ownership land on the same $60 plan. For how the big chat apps handle training, see which AI companies train on your data.

Is there a free Midjourney alternative?

Several, but Midjourney itself has no free plan: its Discord quick start says "you'll need a subscription" before you make anything (Midjourney). The free tiers below differ most in who can see the results. Leonardo's and Ideogram's free images are public, so a free Midjourney alternative can cost you the same privacy Midjourney's cheaper plans do. Firefly, ChatGPT, and Gemini keep free images out of a public feed, and Morse stores them encrypted in your browser.

Several of the top-ranked lists for this search still send readers to DALL-E 3 inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's help page says it has retired the official DALL-E GPT from ChatGPT, and images now come from ChatGPT Images (OpenAI).

How Morse keeps your images in your browser

Every problem above starts with your images sitting on the company's servers, under your account, where a default setting decides who sees them and a plan upgrade decides whether you can change it. Morse's Studio stores your images in your browser, encrypted, on every plan.

• Stored in your browser. Studio, Morse's image tool, stores your images in your browser, encrypted. That's true on every plan, Free included.
• No training, no ads. Morse doesn't train AI on your content, sell your data, or show ads, so there's no "improve the model" switch to find.
• Locked when you leave. Your images are locked when you sign out, and unlocking takes two keys: one that never leaves your device and one Morse's server gives you when you sign in. A copy of the browser data alone can't be read.
• Keep the ones you want. Clearing your browser deletes them, so download the images you want to keep.

The Free plan is $0 with no card and includes 3 images a day with Z-Image Turbo. Pro, $19 a month ($17 billed yearly), adds unlimited use of Pro image models such as Nano Banana 2 Lite and Qwen Image 3 Pro, plus 4 unfiltered image models. Unfiltered models are on paid plans only, and Morse still reports child sexual abuse material to NCMEC.

Studio sits beside Chat and Characters in one account, with over 30 models, open and closed. If you write prompts with a chat model before you render them, the privacy mode you pick for each chat covers that side of the project:

• Private, for brainstorming prompts no host keeps. Open-weight models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM, plus Grok, run here. Morse has zero data retention agreements with its inference, search, and other providers.
• Anonymous, for GPT, Claude, or Gemini without your name on it. The provider sees the message without knowing it's you, and may keep it for a limited time to check for abuse, under its own policy. Leave names you'd rather keep to yourself out of the prompt.
• E2EE, for a brief no one should read. Your browser checks the enclave's proof that it's genuine, then encrypts the message so only that enclave can read it, as long as the enclave hardware and attestation work as designed. E2EE chats come with Pro, $19 a month. Image generation doesn't run in E2EE, so use it for the words, then take the finished prompt to Studio.

Your chat history is stored only in your browser, encrypted, not on Morse's servers, and because Morse doesn't store chats, it usually has very little to give authorities.

Adobe Firefly

Firefly is built for commercial work. Adobe's content analysis FAQ, updated June 4, 2026, says "We do not analyze your content to train generative AI models, unless you choose to submit content to the Adobe Stock marketplace," and that Firefly's own models "were trained on licensed content, like Adobe Stock, and public domain content" (Adobe). For the GPT Image and Nano Banana models Firefly also offers, Adobe says "Adobe and our partners do not train on your personal or project data" (Adobe).

The Firefly Community gallery is opt-in: you pick "Submit to gallery," and by submitting you let Adobe use your image, prompt, name, and profile picture in marketing, and let others generate from your prompt (Adobe). Plans start at $9.99 a month for 2,000 generative credits, and you get free daily generations without a plan (Adobe). Adobe's guidelines, updated May 15, 2026, say prompts and results "may be reviewed through both automated (such as machine learning) and manual methods" (Adobe).

Leonardo

Leonardo, a Canva brand, writes the trade-off down more clearly than anyone else on this list. On Free, "all Content you generate is publicly available by default. It may be viewed by other users, appears in search results, and can be indexed by search engines," and its privacy policy says it may train on your content, adding: "If you don't want your Content to be used for machine learning, you can generate Content privately with any paid subscription plan" (Leonardo). Its terms, updated January 19, 2026, promise it won't use private content for "training AI models or developing new products without your express written consent," while public content can be used "for any commercial purpose" (Leonardo).

Free gives 150 fast tokens a day; Essential, $12 a month, makes creations private and opens 80+ models (Leonardo). On Free, Leonardo also holds rights to use and distribute what you make.

Ideogram

Ideogram's default matches Midjourney's. Its pricing FAQ says "By default, all images on Ideogram are published to encourage sharing within the community," and only Plus and Pro subscribers can generate unpublished images or delete them (Ideogram). Plus is $20 a month, or $15 billed yearly, with 2,400 priority credits. Its terms let other users remix your public work, and its privacy policy, last revised January 15, 2025, says Ideogram uses prompts and uploads to "improve and develop our products and technology" (Ideogram). There are no free trials; eligible free accounts get weekly credits.

ChatGPT Images

ChatGPT keeps your images in your own Images library rather than a public feed, and it's available on every plan, including Free with limits (OpenAI). To delete an image, you delete the conversation it was made in, and your chats train OpenAI's models unless you open Settings, then Data controls, and turn off "Improve the model for everyone" (OpenAI). Plus is $20 a month (OpenAI). We cover the training switch in depth in does ChatGPT train on your data.

Gemini

Gemini makes images with Google's Nano Banana models, and the free plan includes image generation and editing; Google AI Plus is $4.99 a month (Google). Google's help page says Nano Banana 2 Lite is the model used when Gemini is set to Flash-Lite, and that editing images requires you to be 18 or over (Google). The Google pages we read describe no public gallery, but they do describe human review. With Keep Activity on, "a subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers," and reviewed chats are kept "for up to three years" even if you delete your activity (Google). More in is Gemini private.

ComfyUI on your own computer

Running open models yourself is the one option where no company sees the prompt. ComfyUI's README says it "Runs fully offline: core does not download anything unless you request it," runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and can run large open models "on as low as 4GB vram + 8GB ram" (ComfyUI). It supports Flux.2, Qwen Image, Z-Image, and Stable Diffusion models, among others. Its optional partner nodes call paid cloud models, and the --offline flag turns them off. ComfyUI can also recover a complete workflow from images it generates, so check what a file carries before you post it. The cost is the setup and a capable graphics card.

How we compared them

We read every page linked above on October 22, 2026 and took each company at its written word. Midjourney's help center blocks some automated readers, so we read it through a page-fetching service the same day. We didn't generate test images in any app. The column "Trains on what you make?" reflects what each company says, not what we could verify. If you searched for an AI image generator without restrictions, note that every hosted app here has content rules: Midjourney asks for images that are "Safe For Work," and Adobe and Google publish prohibited-use policies.

Choose Midjourney or Morse

Choose Midjourney if its style is what you're after and $60 a month for Stealth Mode is fine, and choose Morse if you'd rather your images stay encrypted in your browser from the first free one, with no upgrade needed.

Start free and make your first three images today, or try a chat from the Morse home page without an account.

Morse publishes this comparison. We've tried to keep it fair; if something's wrong or out of date, email hello@trymorse.ai.

Midjourney is a trademark of Midjourney, Inc. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Midjourney, Inc.