Leonardo AI

Tested Leonardo AI over three weeks producing marketing creative for two product launches - hero banners, social ad variants, and blog header illustrations. Baseline was Midjourney v6 for hero work and Ideogram for anything with embedded text. Specifically wanted to validate Leonardo Style references and the fine-tuned model library for brand consistency, since the two product lines needed visually distinct but internally consistent banner sets. Roughly 1,200 generations across both lines over the test window.

Style References finally solved the brand consistency problem that Midjourney still struggles with in v6 - locked a hero shot once and reused the same lighting and color treatment across 40 banners without re-prompting from scratch every time. Realtime Canvas felt genuinely useful for sketching composition before committing to a longer gen. The fine-tuned model library was a real differentiator: the Anime Pastel model produced exactly the look I wanted for one product line, and the Photoreal models held up against Midjourney on lifestyle shots about 80 percent of the time. Batch gen with grid output saved hours of review time.

Hand and face quality is still half a step behind Midjourney v6 on closeups - had to regenerate roughly four out of ten portrait gens. Prompt adherence on any image containing text was visibly worse than Ideogram, with letters scrambling on about half of attempts even with the Prompt Magic toggle on. Inference is slower than competitors, often 25 to 40 seconds per image on Production tier, which adds friction during creative review sessions. The token economy can drain unexpectedly fast during batch generation, and the Pro tier ceiling forced me to upgrade twice during the sprint. UI organization across folders and projects gets confused above 500 saved assets.

Best fit for marketing teams who need consistent brand style across high-volume creative batches and value model variety. Midjourney remains the right pick when raw aesthetic quality on a single hero shot matters most. Ideogram wins for any creative containing text. Recraft AI handles vector and brand-asset workflows better. Pick Leonardo when style consistency at scale is the job.