FLUX or Stable Diffusion: which to choose for business
Both suit banners, covers and product card visuals, and both allow commercial use only with conditions. FLUX, from the authors of Stable Diffusion, renders text in images well, keeps composition and edits photos from a description (Kontext); it needs a GPU and ranges from 4B to 32B; [schnell] and [klein] 4B are Apache 2.0, the [dev] versions are non-commercial. Stable Diffusion runs even on a home PC (0.9B to 8B) and has a huge ecosystem of fine-tunes, styles and plugins; SD3 and SD3.5 are free under $1M annual revenue. FLUX is newer (2026-01 vs 2024-10).
Comparison based on catalog data
| Parameter | FLUX | Stable Diffusion |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Image generation | Image generation |
| Developer | Black Forest Labs, Germany | Stability AI, UK |
| Releases | Aug 2024 – Jan 2026 | Aug 2022 – Oct 2024 |
| Sizes | 4B – 32B | 0.9B – 8B |
| Hardware | 1 GPU | Laptop, 1 GPU |
| Commercial use | Commercial use with conditions | Commercial use with conditions |
| License | FLUX.1 [schnell] and FLUX.2 [klein] 4B: Apache 2.0; [dev] versions: non-commercial | SD 1.x — CreativeML OpenRAIL-M, SDXL — OpenRAIL++, SD3 and SD3.5 — Stability AI Community License (free for revenue under $1M per year); Stable Cascade — non-commercial research license |
| Russian | Not applicable | Not applicable |
| Ollama | No | No |
| Without GPU | No | No |
| Tasks |
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Choose FLUX if
- You need readable text in the image: headlines, banner captions
- You want to edit photos from a text description (FLUX.1 Kontext)
- You need Apache 2.0 for commercial use: FLUX.1 [schnell] or FLUX.2 [klein] 4B
Choose Stable Diffusion if
- You have no powerful GPU: Stable Diffusion runs on a home PC
- You want to fine-tune the model on your brand style
- You rely on ready styles, plugins and fine-tunes from the ecosystem
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