Ideogram

Overview

Ideogram is the image generator to beat when your image needs to contain accurate text. Its current flagship is Ideogram 4.0, released on June 3, 2026 — a 9.3-billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer trained from scratch rather than fine-tuned from an existing model. For logos, posters, banners and packaging — anything where typography is a first-class citizen — it is the default pick.

Key Features

Industry-leading text rendering

Ideogram 4.0 scores 0.97 on the X-Omni English OCR benchmark for in-image text accuracy, placing first among open-weight models with only OpenAI's and Google's closed systems above it. It stays coherent across long phrases, multiple fonts and mixed sizes.

Layout control through JSON prompts

The model accepts structured JSON prompts, so you can pin elements to exact bounding-box coordinates, lock a colour palette to specific hex codes, and style each line of text individually. Output goes up to 2K. This is the biggest practical change in 4.0 — it moves the workflow closer to laying out a design than describing one.

Open weights and Style References

4.0's weights, inference code and prompting guide are public on Hugging Face and GitHub and it runs locally on a 24GB-class GPU, with commercial deployment covered by a license that scales with usage. Up to 3 reference images steer style, and looks can be saved and reused as "Style Codes".

Plans & Pricing

Plan	Monthly	Highlights
Free	$0	A small allowance of slow credits
Basic	$8	400 priority credits/mo, commercial use
Plus	$20	1,000 credits/mo
Pro	$60	3,500 credits/mo

Annual billing saves roughly 25–30%. The Ideogram V4 API costs $0.03 (Turbo), $0.06 (Default) and $0.10 (Quality) per image, and top-up credits run $4 for 250. Character reference adds $0.05–0.11 per image on the API but is included without limit for subscribers.

Typical Use Cases

• Logo and typographic poster work
• Social ads and banners with headline copy
• Product packaging and book-cover mockups
• Thumbnail and event flyer generation

Strengths

• Best-in-class accuracy on rendered text
• JSON prompts control element placement and palette
• Open weights allow local execution
• Style Codes keep campaigns on-brand

Weaknesses

• Pure illustration quality is competitive but not top of the heap
• Credit burn swings wildly by model and quality setting
• Less stylistically opinionated than Midjourney

Official Info

• Web: https://ideogram.ai
• Ideogram 4.0: https://ideogram.ai/news/ideogram-4.0/