FLUX 1.1 Pro vs Stable Diffusion 3: AI Image Generation Compared
Pick Stable Diffusion 3 for editorial illustration, watercolour, comic art, mid-century print, and anything painterly — it interprets prompts more loosely and produces more visually interesting style work. Use FLUX 1.1 Pro for literal scene descriptions and photographic prompts where prompt fidelity matters more than artistic flair.
Side-by-side examples
Same prompt, run on both models - visual comparison images coming soon. In the meantime, try both directly in the editor with the buttons below.
FLUX 1.1 Pro
Visual demo coming soon
Stable Diffusion 3
Visual demo coming soon
Specs at a glance
| Property | FLUX 1.1 ProStandard | Stable Diffusion 3Artistic |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Black Forest Labs | Stability AI |
| Released | 2024 | 2024 |
| Tier | Standard | Artistic |
| Price/gen | 1 credit | 2 credits |
| Speed | ~5-8 seconds | ~10 seconds |
| Style | Realistic-leaning | Painterly-leaning |
| Prompt fidelity | High (literal) | Medium (interpretive) |
| Best for | Photographic / mockup | Editorial / illustration |
Where FLUX 1.1 Pro wins
- Literal scene descriptions — 'a man in a red coat sitting on a wooden bench' produces a man in a red coat on a wooden bench, not a painterly reinterpretation.
- Mockups and product shots — when the deliverable needs to look like reality, FLUX is the right register.
- Iteration speed and cost — 1 credit and 5-8 seconds vs SD3's 2 credits and ~10 seconds.
- UI mockups — app screenshots, dashboard concepts, photo-real interface visualisations.
Where Stable Diffusion 3 wins
- Watercolour, gouache, oil, ink — SD3 covers traditional painting media without needing LoRA tuning.
- Editorial illustration — blog hero images, book covers, music artwork where 'looks like a painting' beats 'looks like a photo'.
- Comic and manga — bold ink lines, halftone shading, anime-adjacent work all sit in SD3's training distribution.
- Abstract and surreal prompts — 'dreamy landscape of impossible architecture' produces something visually richer than FLUX's more literal take.
Which one should you actually pick?
If your prompt could be answered with a photograph, use FLUX 1.1 Pro. If your prompt needs interpretation — a feeling, a style, a vibe — use Stable Diffusion 3. The decision is rarely about which model is technically better; it's about whether your brief lives in the realistic-leaning half of image generation or the painterly-leaning half. EdMyPic shows both in the model selector so you can run the same prompt twice and pick the winner.
Frequently asked questions
- Can SD3 do photographs?
- It can but not its strength — even with explicit 'photoreal' prompts, SD3 keeps a slight painterly tint. For photo-real work, RealVisXL V4 or FLUX 2 Pro produce cleaner output.
- Is SD3 still relevant in 2026?
- For artistic and illustrative work — yes, it's still one of the top-3 models alongside FLUX 1.1 Pro and Midjourney for painterly output. Stability AI's edge is breadth of styles without LoRA tuning.
- Why does SD3 cost 2 credits if it's faster than RealVisXL?
- Replicate prices models on GPU memory + license cost, not just inference time. SD3 uses the larger DiT architecture which costs more to host even when it runs quickly.
Try both models in the editor
Run the same prompt on both and pick the winner. First generation is free.