# FLUX vs Recraft (2026): side-by-side comparison

Source: [GLAD-AI-TOR](https://glad-ia-tor.com) · Full page: https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/flux-vs-recraft
Arena: ai-image · Crowd scores are live visitor verdicts (one per person per tool, never paid, Bayesian-smoothed).

## At a glance

| | FLUX | Recraft |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $3/mo | $12/mo |
| Crowd score | 71% (3 votes) | 71% (3 votes) |
| provider | Black Forest Labs | Recraft |
| freeTier | Open weights free to self-host: [klein] 4B Apache 2.0, 9B non-commercial, [dev] 32B non-commercial | 50 daily credits, personal use only: images are owned by Recraft, public in the community gallery, no commercial rights |
| maxResolution | 4MP (about 2048x2048) | 2048x2048 (Recraft V4 Pro) |
| editing | yes | yes |
| api | yes | yes |
| openWeights | yes | no |
| imageQuality (1-5) | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| promptAdherence (1-5) | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| easeOfUse (1-5) | 3 | 4 |
| speed (1-5) | 4 | 3.5 |
| valueForMoney (1-5) | 5 | 4.5 |

### FLUX

> The open-weight champion: 32B FLUX.2 wins 66.6% of head-to-heads vs open rivals, API from $0.014 per image

Strengths:
- FLUX.2 [dev] leads every open-weight rival by a wide margin: 66.6% text-to-image win rate vs 51.3% for Qwen-Image and 48.1% for HunyuanImage 3.0
- Cheapest frontier-quality API in the category: FLUX.2 [klein] from $0.014 per image, [pro] from $0.03, [max] from $0.07 (first megapixel)
- Real open weights: [dev] 32B on Hugging Face for research, [klein] 4B under Apache 2.0, 9B under a non-commercial license, with full control, LoRA fine-tuning and no vendor lock-in
- Edits images at up to 4 megapixels while keeping character, product and brand-style consistency across multiple reference images

Weaknesses:
- FLUX.2 [dev] is heavy: about 32-35GB VRAM even in FP8/Q8 quantization and 64GB+ at BF16, so a single RTX 4090 only runs a heavily quantized Q4 build
- [dev] weights are non-commercial: any business use of self-hosted outputs requires a paid BFL license or falling back to the API
- Developer-first product with no polished consumer app on par with Midjourney or ChatGPT: expect ComfyUI, the API playground or code

Verdict: The developer's pick. If you need open weights, fine-tuning or the lowest API bill, FLUX.2 is the strongest option of mid-2026: [pro] at $0.03 per image undercuts GPT Image 2's medium tier, and [klein] runs on consumer GPUs under a true Apache 2.0 license. Skip it if you want a polished consumer creative suite, that is Midjourney's and ChatGPT's territory. And read the license before self-hosting [dev]: commercial use of the 32B weights requires paying Black Forest Labs.

Full review: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/flux · Markdown: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/flux.md

### Recraft

> The only AI that outputs real editable SVGs, and its V4 model tops the Hugging Face arena ahead of Midjourney V8 and FLUX

Strengths:
- Recraft V4 (Feb 2026) tops the Hugging Face Text-to-Image Arena in head-to-head human preference evals, ahead of Midjourney V8, DALL-E 3 and FLUX
- Only model in the market that natively generates production-ready SVGs: real paths, structured layers and clean geometry, directly editable in Illustrator or Figma
- Professional designers judged 82% of Recraft outputs production adequate when compared against human work
- Best-in-class text rendering: legible, layout-faithful typography for menus, packaging, infographics and signage

Weaknesses:
- Free plan images are owned by Recraft, published in the public community gallery and not licensed for commercial use; you need a paid plan for ownership
- Strict no-refund policy: cancelling an annual Pro commitment mid-year means the entire prepaid amount is lost, a recurring complaint in 2026 reviews
- Credit caps feel restrictive for heavy users, the most common criticism across G2 and Capterra reviews

Verdict: Recraft is the obvious buy for designers: if you need logos, icons or any vector asset, no other model produces real editable SVGs, and V4's leaderboard-topping raster quality removes the old trade-off. At $12/mo for Basic ($10 annual) with full commercial rights it undercuts Midjourney while beating it in 2026 human preference rankings. Developers get one of the cheapest quality APIs at $0.04 per image. Avoid the free plan for anything professional, since Recraft owns those images, and think twice before prepaying annually given the no-refund policy. Photographers and video-first creators should look at Krea or Firefly instead, since Recraft does images only.

Full review: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/recraft · Markdown: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/recraft.md

## More

Full ai-image ranking: https://glad-ia-tor.com/hall-of-fame/ai-image

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