Best Anime AI Art Generators in 2023 (Compared)

Are you looking to start generating high-quality, artistic anime images with AI, but can't figure out how to get started?

It's even tougher because people will tell you to just install Stable Diffusion. What if you don't want that hassle?

I've tested quite a few generation websites and apps. Here's what I think.

Quick Comparison Table

	Free Plan	Lowest Monthly Price	Speed	NSFW Capable	Best Features
Yodayo	60 gens + 30 gens/day	Credit system: $5 for 110 gens	20-30 seconds/gen	Yes	Easy to use, good community, great social features
Getimg.ai	100 gens	$12/mo for 3000 gens	<5 seconds/gen	Yes	Robust feature set: inpainting, outpainting and training
PlaygroundAI	1000 gens /day	$12/mo annually for 2000 gens a day (60k gens/mo)	<10 seconds/gen	No	Best pricing, Infinite canvas is great for exploring ideas
Mage Space	Unlimited	Unlimited	30-60 seconds/gen (free) <10 seconds/gen (paid)	Yes: paid only	Best social features and animation
Holara	30 gens + 4 gens/day	$10/mo for 2000 gens	<10 seconds/gen	Yes	Anime focused and includes furry gen niche
ArtBot	Unlimited	NA	5 minutes/gen	Yes	Completely free

Best Anime Generators - Full Analysis

Yodayo

Capabilities	‣ Wide model selection ‣ Many LoRAs (aka "spells"), used to add characters or styles to models ‣ Chatbot Tavern: create and talk to chatbots ‣ Social Feed
Speed	‣ 20-30 seconds/generation
NSFW	‣ Uncensored NSFW images and NSFW chatbots
Pricing	‣ Credits are called YoBeans. Generations cost 5 YoBeans. ‣ 300 YoBeans for signing up, 150 claimable YoBeans per day ‣ (60 gens + 30 gens per day) ‣ $5 for 550 YoBeans (110 gens) ‣ $20 for 3000 YoBeans (600 gens)

Yodayo is a great way to dip your toes into anime generation because the free plan is so generous. You get 60 free generations upon signing up, and every day you get an addition 30 free generations (you must claim credits manually).

The model selection is quite wide and will include any anime model you've heard of. I noticed they have a wide selection of realism/semi-realism models as well.

Another neat feature that the rest of the websites here don't have is the Tavern, which lets you create characters and chat with other user created characters. The chatbot reply time was a bit slow for my liking, but I can't complain too much since it's a free service.

There's a pretty good gallery/feed of other peoples' generations and prompts. You can use this to find the generations of a specific user. This is very helpful for learning how to prompt better. You do have to adjust your settings if you want to see NSFW images in your feed.

Getimg.ai

Capabilities	‣ 13 anime models, many more realism models ‣ AI Editor (like Photoshop) ‣ AI Canvas ‣ DreamBooth (train AI on your face)
Speed	‣ Less than 5 seconds/generation
NSFW	‣ Uncensored NSFW images
Pricing	‣ 100 free generations when you sign up ‣ $12/mo for 3000 images (and 2 DreamBooth models) ‣ $49/mo for 24k images (and 12 DreamBooth models)

Getimg.ai does a very good job of making Stable Diffusion easy to use.

Since it is a general purpose image generation app, its anime model selection is much more limited than the other apps on this list. That being said, the team did a good job of choosing the more popular models.

Getimg.ai has some unique features that differentiate it from other websites:

AI Canvas: This is an infinite canvas that lets you use outpainting as much as you want. Outpainting is when you generate more of an image, outside of its frame.

Image Editor: This is close to Photoshop's generative AI functionality. The image editor lets you inpaint (paint over an area and regenerate it), as well as run other Stable Diffusion features on the image.

DreamBooth: DreamBooth is the technology behind the AI Avatar trend. It's what lets you upload your image and generate images of yourself in any style. Few of the websites on this list have this feature. It's only available on paid plans.

Read: Getimg.ai In-depth Review

PlaygroundAI

Capabilities	‣ Many realism/semi-realism models ‣ Infinite Canvas ‣ Social Feed ‣ ControlNet (aka "Control Traits")
Speed	‣ 5-10 seconds
NSFW	‣ Prohibited
Pricing	‣ Free up to 1000 images a day ‣ $12/mo annually for 2000 images a day + advanced features

The first thing you should know about PlaygroundAI is the free plan is very generous.

PlaygroundAI is free for up to 1000 images a day; most people aren't going to get anywhere near that, so the product may as well be free.

One of the coolest differences between PlaygroundAI and the other websites is the Canvas view. You can pan or zoom around an infinite canvas and move your generations around: it feels like something straight out of Photoshop or Figma.

If you have a creative idea, it's much easier to play around with it in PlaygroundAI. You can see the generation settings of every image you've created.

You'll also notice how much guidance the website offers. While other apps throw you into the interface and let you fend for yourself, the PlaygroundAI interface is filled with tooltips, many of which have their own Youtube videos.

PlaygroundAI refers to models as "filters". The model selection is quite extensive, and they've done a good job of including SDXL models (the latest development in models are SDXL-based models, which can generate at higher resolution and better quality than previous models which are based on SD 1.5 - Stable Diffusion v1.5)

The downside for anime enthusiasts is that most of the models are realistic or semi-realistic models. If you're trying to go for a semi-realistic anime style you have lots of options, but you're much more limited if you want a more classical anime style:

Mage Space

Capabilities	‣ Extensive selection of popular models, LoRAs and Textual Inversions (paid only) ‣ Social feed ‣ Generation history ‣ Create animated AI GIFs (paid only) ‣ ControlNet, img2img
Speed	‣ Free generations take 30-60 seconds ‣ Paid plan generations take >10 seconds
NSFW	‣ Enabled on paid plan only
Pricing	‣ Unlimited generations on free, but must pay to use faster GPUs and anime models. ‣ $15/mo Pro plan

You'll really need the pro plan ($15/mo) to use Mage Space.

Even though you can get unlimited generations on the free plan, you won't be able to use any custom models, and being limited to the base models (SDXL, SD 1.5, SD 2.1) is very boring!

You can find examples and prompts for every single model:

What I like the most about Mage Space is the team has put a considerable amount of thought into the social & collaborative features. You can follow people, and also Rerun or Remix (rerun with slight modifications) their generations. There's also a feature called Reimage, which uses the image for img2img generation.

Here's what we get from remixing:

Animations: Mage Space can create animations using the AnimateDiff technology. You run this feature like a regular generation, and you will get a 3 second long animation. you won't get much control over the 'action' in the animation, but it's still very cool.

AI Canvas: This is an infinite canvas that lets you use outpainting as much as you want. Outpainting is when you generate more of an image, outside of its frame.

Image Editor: This is close to Photoshop's generative AI functionality. The image editor lets you inpaint (paint over an area and regenerate it), as well as run other Stable Diffusion features on the image.

DreamBooth: DreamBooth is the technology behind the AI Avatar trend. It's what lets you upload your image and generate images of yourself in any style. Few of the websites on this list have this feature. It's only available on paid plans.

Holara

Capabilities	‣ Focused selection of proprietary anime models ‣ Social gallery ‣ Img2img ‣ Discord Bot ‣ Img2img
Speed	‣ Less than 10 seconds/generation
NSFW	‣ Capable of uncensored NSFW images
Pricing	‣ Regular generations cost 6 hologems ‣ Free: 200 Hologems +  25 Hologems daily bonus ‣ $10/mo Pro plan: 5000 Hologems + 100 Hologems daily bonus (~2000 images) ‣ $25/mo Pro plan: 20,000 Hologems + 300 Hologems daily bonus (~7250 images)

Unlike the other websites in this list, Holara offers their own proprietary models instead of open-source community models. This is a more focused experience for the user since every model has something it's particularly good at, but may feel restrictive for power users. It's one of few websites that offers anthropomorphic furry models.

Like Mage Space, it features a social gallery and the ability to copy other peoples' prompts. You can see the experience is anime-only.

ArtBot

Capabilities	‣ ControlNet, img2img, inpainting ‣ Live paint (sketch to generation) ‣ Very wide selection of anime models
Speed	‣ +5 minutes/generation
NSFW	‣ Capable of uncensored NSFW images
Pricing	‣ Free

ArtBot is a Stable Diffusion website based on the Stable Horde. The Stable Horde is a crowdsourced cluster of GPUs. Anybody can be generous contribute their GPU to the horde so that other people can use them.

This is a very well done project by Dave Schumaker. It has most important Stable Diffusion features, however the interface will be difficult to use if you aren't fa

There is a kudos system: by voting on other peoples' generations or contributing your GPU to the Stable Horde, you gain kudos, which will give you priority in the generation queue.

If you don't have kudos, generations take quite a while: it took me 7 minutes to run a generation.

Methodology

With new generation apps popping up every week, how do you choose the best one?

We analyze each app based on a number of factors, with a special focus on a few key aspects. Some of these aspects were specific to this article:

• Anime image quality: This is largely dependent on what underlying models you use. However, we noticed some apps give you great default settings / a great default model so you can generate fantastic images immediately
• Ease of use: How many hoops do you have to jump through before you generate your first image? Stable Diffusion is not the easiest technology to understand - what have these apps done to make themselves and their features user-friendly?
• Generation speed: While apps like ArtBot are completely free and have a very robust feature set, they're marked down because of slow generation speeds.
• What you get on a free plan: While we understand these are businesses, some of these websites have very generous free use limits, others very stingy limits.