The 5 best Recraft AI alternatives for designers in 2025

It feels like AI is popping up everywhere these days, right? One minute it’s helping write emails, the next it’s designing entire brand kits. For creative professionals, tools like Recraft AI have become a familiar part of the workflow for creating vector art and mockups. But it’s not just the design world getting an AI upgrade. Other teams, like customer support, are also seeing a huge shift, with AI now able to tackle support tickets and answer questions on the spot.

I spent a lot of time digging through the crowded market of AI image generators to find the best Recraft AI alternatives out there for designers. We’ll walk through the top five tools that might give you better results, more creative freedom, or just a better price. After that, we’ll look at how this same drive for smarter, faster automation is shaking things up in other essential parts of a business, particularly customer support.

What is Recraft AI?

So, what’s the deal with Recraft AI? In a nutshell, it’s a generative AI platform built with designers in mind. It shines when it comes to creating high-quality vector art, icons, illustrations, and even 3D graphics. Its biggest selling point is its ability to generate a whole suite of design assets that all feel like they belong to the same brand. With an infinite canvas for brainstorming and easy brand style customization, it’s a really handy tool for designers who need to create consistent, on-brand visuals without starting from scratch every time.

Why you might look for Recraft AI alternatives

Look, Recraft is a solid tool, but no single app is the perfect fit for everyone. After playing around with it and reading through user feedback, a few common reasons to look elsewhere started to pop up.

• The free plan feels a bit tight. The daily credit system can be a real workflow killer. If you’re the type of designer who likes to experiment with a dozen prompts to get things just right, or if you just have a busy day, you can blow through your credits pretty fast.

• Editing can be a hassle. Recraft is great for generating the initial image, but if you need to make fine-tuned adjustments, you’ll probably find yourself exporting the file to another program like Illustrator or Figma. That extra step can really slow you down.

• The AI can be a bit literal. Sometimes, the AI doesn’t quite get the memo, especially with more complex or abstract ideas. This can lead to a bit of a back-and-forth, which, again, burns through those daily credits.

• It might be out of budget. For freelancers or small design shops, the paid plans can feel a little steep. With so many different tools available now, it’s worth shopping around to see if another option gives you a better bang for your buck.

Our criteria for choosing the best Recraft AI alternatives

To find the most useful Recraft AI alternatives, I wasn’t just looking for copycats. I wanted to find tools that solve specific problems for designers. I kept a few key things in mind during my search:

• Quality and creative range. How good do the images actually look? And can the tool handle different styles, from photorealistic shots to clean vector illustrations?

• Features that matter. Does the tool support the kind of work professionals do? I was looking for things like vector support, the ability to generate clean text, and easy mockup creation.

• Is it easy to use? A good design tool should feel like a creative partner, not a piece of software you have to fight with. An intuitive interface was a must.

• Pricing and usage rights. I looked for fair and clear pricing models. It’s also important to know you can actually use what you create for commercial projects without any legal headaches.

A quick comparison of the top Recraft AI alternatives

If you’re short on time, here’s a quick rundown of how the top contenders compare.

Tool	Best For	Vector Support	Free Plan	Starting Price (Paid)
Midjourney	High-fidelity, artistic images	No	No	$10/month
Canva	All-in-one design for teams	Yes (editor)	Yes	$14.99/month
Ideogram	Accurate in-image text rendering	No	Yes (limited)	$7/month (billed yearly)
Leonardo AI	Game assets & character design	No	Yes (limited)	$10/month (billed yearly)
Adobe Firefly	Commercially safe, integrated design	Yes (in Illustrator)	Yes (limited)	$9.99/month

The 5 best Recraft AI alternatives in 2025

After spending way too many hours prompting, comparing, and tweaking, I’ve landed on these five tools. Each one brings something different to the table, whether you’re a digital artist, a marketing manager, or a game dev.

1. Midjourney

When it comes to pure artistic firepower, Midjourney is pretty much in a class of its own. It creates stunning, hyper-realistic images that often look more like digital paintings than AI creations. The whole thing runs on Discord, which is a bit quirky but gives it a cool, community-focused feel where you can get inspired by what other people are making. If your number one priority is jaw-dropping visual quality, this is it.

• Best for: Digital artists, concept designers, and anyone who needs high-impact visuals that truly stand out.

• Pros: The image quality is just incredible, plain and simple. The active Discord community is also a huge plus for bouncing ideas around.

• Cons: The Discord-only interface takes some getting used to. Nailing the perfect prompt can feel more like an art than a science, and it doesn’t create editable vector files, which is a big miss for many graphic designers.

• Pricing: Midjourney doesn’t have a free plan.

  • Basic Plan: $10/month for about 200 image generations.

  • Standard Plan: $30/month for unlimited "relaxed" generations and 15 hours of "fast" generations.

  • Pro Plan: $60/month for 30 fast hours and private image generation.

  • Mega Plan: $120/month for 60 fast hours.

2. Canva

Canva has basically become the default design tool for anyone who needs to create great-looking stuff without a design degree. It’s a one-stop shop with templates, stock photos, and now a whole set of AI features called Magic Studio. The "Text to Image" app is a perfectly good option for creating visuals right inside the same platform you use for everything else.

• Best for: Social media managers, small business owners, and marketing teams who need to pump out a lot of content quickly and work together on it.

• Pros: It’s ridiculously easy to use. The giant template library is a lifesaver, and its collaboration features make it easy for teams to stay on the same page.

• Cons: The AI-generated images aren’t quite as stunning as what you’d get from a specialized tool like Midjourney. You’ll also find that a lot of the best AI features are tucked away behind the Canva Pro subscription.

• Pricing:

  • Canva Free: A pretty generous free plan with tons of templates and some basic AI features.

  • Canva Pro: $120/year for one person, which unlocks all the premium assets, Brand Kits, and more AI credits.

  • Canva for Teams: Starts at $100/year per person (for at least 3 people) and adds more tools for brand management and team collaboration.

3. Ideogram

You know that thing where you ask an AI for a simple sign and it gives you alphabet soup? Ideogram actually fixes that. Its main claim to fame is its ability to reliably create images with clean, readable text. For certain design projects, this isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.

• Best for: Anyone making posters, logos, t-shirt designs, or social media graphics where the text has to be perfect.

• Pros: It nails text rendering better than anyone else. The "Magic Prompt" feature is also pretty cool for taking a simple idea and fleshing it out with creative details for you. The interface is simple and clean.

• Cons: The overall image quality sometimes lacks the artistic polish of Midjourney. Also, the free credits are given out weekly, so if you use them all on Monday, you’re out of luck until next week.

• Pricing:

  • Free Plan: 10 weekly credits (which gets you up to 40 images).

  • Basic Plan: $7/month (billed yearly) for 400 priority credits each month.

  • Plus Plan: $15/month (billed yearly) for 1,000 priority credits, private generations, and image uploads.

  • Pro Plan: $42/month (billed yearly) for 3,500 priority credits and batch processing.

4. Leonardo AI

Leonardo AI was built from the ground up for creative work, especially for the gaming and entertainment industries. It gives you a whole toolbox of fine-tuned AI models designed to create consistent characters, game assets, and concept art. If you need to build out an entire visual world where everything looks like it belongs, Leonardo AI gives you the controls to pull it off.

• Best for: Game developers, concept artists, and illustrators who need to generate a lot of assets while keeping a consistent style.

• Pros: It’s excellent for creating detailed characters and game assets. You can even train your own custom models on your art style. The free plan is also one of the more generous ones, with 150 daily tokens.

• Cons: All the different models and settings can feel a bit overwhelming if you’re new to this. The best features and highest-quality outputs are reserved for paying customers.

• Pricing:

  • Free Plan: 150 daily "fast" tokens.

  • Apprentice Plan: $10/month (billed yearly) for 8,500 tokens per month and private generations.

  • Artisan Plan: $24/month (billed yearly) for 25,000 tokens and unlimited "relaxed" generations.

  • Maestro Plan: $48/month (billed yearly) for 60,000 tokens and unlimited image and video generation.

5. Adobe Firefly

Adobe’s big play in the AI space is Firefly, and its main selling point is confidence. It’s trained only on Adobe Stock images and openly licensed content, meaning everything you create is commercially safe to use. But its real magic is how it plugs directly into the Adobe Creative Cloud apps you already use, like Photoshop and Illustrator.

• Best for: Professional designers, agencies, and large teams that are already deep in the Adobe ecosystem and need AI visuals without any copyright worries.

• Pros: That "commercially safe" label is a huge deal for businesses. The integration with Adobe apps, like the Generative Fill feature in Photoshop, is a massive time-saver.

• Cons: The free credits are pretty stingy. To really get the most out of it, you need a Creative Cloud subscription, which isn’t cheap.

• Pricing:

  • Free Plan: Includes 25 generative credits per month.

  • Firefly Standard: $9.99/month for 2,000 credits/month.

  • Firefly Pro: $19.99/month for 4,000 credits/month plus Adobe Express Premium and Photoshop access.

Beyond design: Automating customer support with AI

This whole hunt for better AI tools got me thinking. It’s not just designers looking for a smarter way to work. Customer support teams are going through the same exact shift. Just as you might be searching for a Recraft alternative to speed up your design process, support teams are looking for AI that can clear out their ticket queue and give customers instant answers.

This is where a tool like eesel AI fits into the picture. It’s not an image generator, but it’s an AI agent built to automate customer support, and there are some interesting parallels.

Just like Recraft learns your brand’s look to create consistent visuals, eesel AI learns your brand’s voice by training on your past support conversations and help articles. And while designers want precise control over image styles, support teams need that same level of control over automation. eesel AI lets you decide exactly which tickets the AI should handle and which ones need a human touch.

This workflow demonstrates how eesel AI automates customer support by analyzing tickets, providing instant answers, and escalating to human agents when necessary.

Why teams choose eesel AI for their support automation

• Get started in minutes, not months. You can forget about long sales calls and complicated setups. eesel AI is a self-serve platform that connects in one click to helpdesks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom. You can be up and running in the time it takes to make a coffee.

• Bring all your knowledge together. Good support answers don’t just live in the help center. eesel AI can connect to the places your other teams already work, like Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack.

• Test it out before you go live. A little nervous about letting an AI talk to your customers? I get it. eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test it on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have replied and measure its performance before you flip the switch.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, where users can test the AI's performance on past tickets before activating it for live customer interactions.

This video explores some of the best AI image generators available in 2025, offering a visual guide to the top Recraft AI alternatives discussed.

Choose the right Recraft AI alternatives for the job

The AI tool landscape is getting bigger every day, but finding the right one isn’t about jumping on the newest, shiniest thing. It’s about figuring out what you actually need to do and matching a tool’s strengths to that specific job. Whether you’re creating beautiful art with Midjourney, whipping up a social media campaign in Canva, or giving customers instant answers with AI, the goal is the same: using technology to work smarter, not harder.

Ready to automate your customer support?

If you’re trying to cut down on ticket backlogs and give your support team more time to focus on complex issues, AI-powered support is the way to go. eesel AI can be live in minutes, learning from the knowledge you already have to provide support that feels helpful and human.

Start your free trial today or book a demo to see how it works.