Straight answer: real DALL-E 3 only lives inside three places now, ChatGPT, Microsoft Designer, and Bing Image Creator, everything else calling itself “DALL-E style” is a different model wearing the same marketing hat. That is not a problem, some of those other models are better than DALL-E for marketing work, but you should know what you are buying before you hand over your card details.
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The bit nobody tells you about “DALL-E style”
Here is the uncomfortable truth I keep bumping into with clients: half the tools that show up in a Google search for “DALL-E style image generator” have nothing to do with OpenAI’s model. They use Stable Diffusion, or their own proprietary model, or a mix, and they slap “DALL-E style” or “like DALL-E” into their SEO copy because that phrase gets searched a lot and their actual model name does not.
I found this out the hard way about eighteen months ago when a client asked me to recreate a brand image “in the DALL-E style, you know, the one that made those weird hands.” I tried three separate tools that all used that exact phrase in their marketing. None of them were DALL-E. One was Stable Diffusion 1.5 running through a wrapper site with a fifteen dollar monthly fee and adverts inside the free tier. I only found out when I asked their support chat directly which model they were running.
So the honest map looks like this. If you want the actual DALL-E 3 model, your three real options are ChatGPT (now branded as ChatGPT Images inside the app), Microsoft Designer, and Bing Image Creator. If you want the DALL-E vibe, the loose, slightly surreal, very literal-to-the-prompt style, there are a dozen tools that will give you something similar or better. I will cover both, labelled, so you are not paying for a name.
Where actual DALL-E 3 lives
- ChatGPT (ChatGPT Plus, $20 a month): this is the main home of DALL-E 3 now. You type a prompt in normal conversation, it generates the image inline, and you can ask it to edit specific parts without regenerating the whole thing. I wrote a full breakdown of how this changed my own workflow in my ChatGPT Images 2.0 review, including why I stopped opening Canva for quick social graphics.
- Microsoft Designer (free with a Microsoft account): this is Microsoft’s own design tool built on top of DALL-E, with templates for social posts, banners, and greeting cards baked in. Free tier gives you a daily credit allowance, paid Microsoft 365 accounts get more.
- Bing Image Creator (free, folded into Microsoft Designer now): same engine, simpler interface, fifteen “boosts” a day for faster generation before it slows down.
If your brief says “must be DALL-E,” these three are your only honest options. Everything else is a different model.
Where the DALL-E style, without the DALL-E name, lives
Now for the tools marketers reach for day to day, because in practice most people do not care which model made the image, they care whether it looks good and matches the brief.
- Midjourney ($10 a month for the basic plan, roughly 200 images): this is the one I use most for anything that needs to look expensive, hero images, campaign visuals, anything going on a landing page. It runs through Discord or its own web app now. Texture and lighting are noticeably better than DALL-E for product and lifestyle style shots.
- Adobe Firefly (from $9.99 a month standalone, included in most Creative Cloud plans): the safest legal choice for a big brand, because Adobe trained it on licensed Adobe Stock content and its own library, so the commercial usage rights are cleaner than most competitors. If a client’s legal team asks questions, Firefly is the answer that ends the conversation fastest.
- Canva Magic Media (included in Canva Pro, $12.99 a month): not the best image quality on this list, but the fastest for someone who is not a designer, because you generate the image and drop it straight into a template you were already editing. Good enough for internal slides and quick social posts, not good enough for a hero banner.
- Ideogram (free tier, paid from $8 a month): the strongest of the lot for images that need actual readable text in them, logos, posters, anything with a headline baked into the graphic. DALL-E and Midjourney both mangle text far more often.
- Leonardo.Ai (free tier with 150 daily tokens, paid from $12 a month): strong for consistent character and product shots across a campaign, because it lets you train a small custom model on your own reference images, useful if you keep needing the same mascot or product in different scenes.
- Flux (via Freepik, Leonardo, or its own API, prices vary, roughly $10 to $15 a month through most wrappers): newer model that has quietly become a favourite among designers for photorealism, particularly faces and hands, the two things older models struggled with most.
I go through the free versions of most of these, what you get before you hit a paywall, in my walkthrough of generating images with AI tools for free. Worth reading before you subscribe to anything, because the free tiers change their limits roughly every few months and some go from generous to stingy overnight.
A real example: the LinkedIn carousel that took twelve attempts
A client of mine, a fintech startup founder, wanted a five-slide LinkedIn carousel showing a “faceless team collaborating around a glowing dashboard,” their words, not mine. I started in ChatGPT Images because it was already open. Attempt one gave me six fingers on the left hand of the front figure. Attempt four fixed the hand but put a second, smaller dashboard floating in the background for no reason. By attempt twelve I had something usable, but the lighting was flat and the whole thing looked like stock photography from 2019.
I switched the same prompt into Midjourney. First attempt, better lighting, better composition, but a hand issue again on a secondary figure. Second attempt, clean. Total time in Midjourney: about four minutes. Total time in ChatGPT before I gave up on it for that specific image: closer to twenty five minutes.
The lesson was not “Midjourney beats ChatGPT,” it was that different models have different strengths and the tool that is fastest for a punchy Instagram quote graphic is often the slowest for a complex multi-figure scene, and the reverse is also true. I now default to ChatGPT for anything text-heavy or edited in stages, and Midjourney for anything that needs to look photographic and expensive. That split has cut my image production time roughly in half across the client work I do each month.
The step-by-step for finding the right one for your brief
- Write the brief down before opening any tool: subject, mood, colour palette, aspect ratio, and where it is going (LinkedIn post, website hero, print ad). Vague briefs produce vague images regardless of the model.
- If the image needs readable text or a logo mark, start in Ideogram, not DALL-E or Midjourney. You will save yourself a dozen failed attempts.
- If it needs to look photographic, with real depth and lighting, start in Midjourney or Flux.
- If you need to iterate on one image in conversation, changing small details without starting over, use ChatGPT Images, because the chat format lets you say “keep everything the same, just change her jacket to navy” and it holds the rest of the scene.
- If your legal or compliance team needs clean commercial rights, use Adobe Firefly, and keep the licence confirmation email, most Adobe plans include one.
- Generate at least four variations of anything going in a paid ad or a hero position and run a quick preference poll with your team or a small email list before you commit budget behind one image.
What this costs across a normal month
For a solo marketer or small business owner doing their own content, I would budget somewhere between $20 and $35 a month total, one text-and-image tool like ChatGPT Plus at $20, plus one specialist tool for the photographic work, either Midjourney’s basic plan at $10 or a Freepik Flux plan at a similar price. That covers social posts, blog headers, and most ad creative. For a small agency producing images for several clients, expect $80 to $150 a month once you add Adobe Firefly for anything client-facing that needs clean licensing, and possibly Leonardo for brand consistency work.
Compare that to a stock photo subscription, which typically runs $30 to $60 a month for a modest library that still looks like everyone else’s LinkedIn feed, or a single custom photoshoot, which for a small brand usually starts around £500 to £1,000 in the UK for a half-day shoot with a decent photographer. The AI route is cheaper and faster, but it is not free, and the time you save on shooting you often spend on prompt iteration, which nobody puts in the pricing page.
Where this fits into a wider marketing toolkit
Image generation on its own does not fix a weak content plan. I cover the wider stack, writing tools alongside design tools, and where each earns its place in a small marketing team’s month, in this piece on AI writer and AI design tools for marketers. Image generation is one part of that stack, and it works best when the copy and the visual are built at the same time rather than the image being an afterthought bolted onto a finished post.
Fashion and product-heavy brands have a particular use case worth a separate mention, mocking up garments and product variations without a full photoshoot for every colourway. I go into that in more detail in this look at how AI is changing fashion marketing, which is worth a read if you are working with a physical product range rather than pure services.
One more practical note if you plan to publish these images heavily on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s spam and authenticity detection has tightened, and accounts posting a high volume of clearly synthetic imagery alongside aggressive automation have been flagged more often over the last year. If your account ever gets restricted for reasons that feel unfair, I have a full recovery process in my LinkedIn account recovery guide, worth bookmarking before you need it, not after.
When to stop doing this yourself
If you are spending more than an hour a week fighting prompts, comparing subscription tiers, and still ending up with images that look almost right but not quite on brand, that is usually the moment to bring in outside help rather than burn another month on trial and error. I work with small businesses on exactly this, building a short, repeatable image and content workflow around the tools that suit their brand rather than whatever is trending that week, and you can see how that engagement typically works on my AI consultant for small business page. It is usually a two to three week piece of work, not an ongoing retainer, because the point is to hand you a system you can run yourself afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
Is DALL-E the same as ChatGPT’s image generator?
Yes, in the current ChatGPT app the image feature runs on DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s own model, so if you are already paying for ChatGPT Plus you already have access to real DALL-E without a separate subscription.
What is the closest free alternative to DALL-E for marketing images?
Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator are both free and run on the actual DALL-E model, giving you a genuine no-cost route to the same technology behind a paywalled ChatGPT plan, with a daily limit on fast generations.
Which AI image generator is safest for commercial use legally?
Adobe Firefly is generally considered the safest for commercial and client-facing work because it was trained on licensed Adobe Stock content and carries clearer usage terms, which matters if legal or compliance teams ever ask questions about an image.
Do I need different AI image tools for different types of marketing images?
In practice yes, most marketers end up using one tool for photographic hero images such as Midjourney or Flux, a different one for images with readable text such as Ideogram, and ChatGPT or Canva for fast, low-stakes social graphics, rather than relying on a single generator for everything.
Primary sources
Related reading: How Do You Use an AI Generator to Create Anime Style Artwork and How to Use an AI Image Generator for Your Marketing.
If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about AI marketing.
