
Ideogram is an AI image generator that gets the words right. Ask for a poster that says "Grand Opening" and you get those words, spelled correctly, in the image. Plenty of other generators still mangle letters often enough that you end up fixing them in Photoshop. Ideogram 3.0 also handles Korean and Japanese text better than most. That makes it the obvious pick for YouTube thumbnails, social cards, flyers and anything else where the text has to be readable. The free plan gives you 10 prompts a day. Its lead is shrinking, though. FLUX, Recraft and Midjourney v7 have all got better at text. Ideogram is still the more reliable choice, just not by the margin it used to have.
Ideogram tackled the problem that made AI images useless for a lot of marketing: text. Plenty of generators still mangle letters. Ideogram gets them right almost every time, and that alone makes it the right tool for thumbnails, promo graphics and branded visuals.
Its images are solid, but they aren't the best-looking around. Midjourney and Recraft produce more polished pictures. What they can't do as reliably is put "SALE 50% OFF" on a banner without turning it into gibberish. If your images need words, start with Ideogram. The others are catching up on text, so it's worth checking again every few months.
Best for YouTube creators, social media managers and small businesses making their own marketing graphics. If you never need text in your images, Midjourney or Recraft will give you nicer results.