DALL-E vs Kolors vs Stable Diffusion: I Tested All Three So You Don't Have To
I've got 47 browser tabs open right now — half of them are AI image generators I bookmarked "for later" and never closed. My GPU fans sound like a jet engine, and my electricity bill is a personal attack. But hey, at least I can tell you which of these things is actually worth your time.
Spoiler: it depends on what you're doing, and the free tier of everything is worse than the marketing suggests.
Quick Verdict
DALL-E (via ChatGPT) is the best for people who want decent results without touching a single setting. Kolors is the sleeper pick if you're generating Asian-style portraits or anime-adjacent stuff and want it free. Stable Diffusion is the only one worth learning if you care about control — but it's also the only one that'll make you want to throw your laptop out a window. (Our design toolkit handles this without the headache.) (Speaking of which, our free image upscaler makes this dead simple.)
Now let me explain why.
DALL-E: The "I Don't Want to Think" Option
DALL-E's whole thing is that you type words, it makes pictures, and you don't touch anything else. That's genuinely useful when you just need a blog header image at 11pm.
The problem? You get three or four generations before ChatGPT starts giving you the "you've reached your limit" treatment. And the images have a certain look. You know the one. Slightly plastic, weirdly lit, hands that are almost right. It's the AI image equivalent of a stock photo from 2013.
Free access is basically a teaser. If you want volume, you're paying.
Kolors: The One Nobody Talks About
Kolors is a Chinese model that got popular because it's genuinely good at certain things. Portraits, especially. Skin tones, hair, that sort of soft lighting that most models botch. It handles Asian faces better than DALL-E by a mile — which makes sense given where it was trained.
You can run it free through various online interfaces, or locally if you've got the hardware. The catch is that documentation is sparse, half the tutorials are in Chinese, and the community is smaller. When something breaks, good luck finding a forum post about it.
That said, if you're doing portrait work and you can't afford Midjourney, Kolors is the move.
Stable Diffusion: The Rabbit Hole
Stable Diffusion is free in the same way that a free puppy is free. You can run it on your own machine, generate unlimited images, and never pay a subscription. But you'll spend a weekend setting it up, another week learning prompts and LoRAs, and a month before you stop making garbage.
The results are the most controllable. You want a specific pose, specific lighting, specific character consistency across 50 images? SD does that. The others don't.
But "free" means you either have a decent GPU or you're paying for cloud compute anyway. And the learning curve is less a curve and more a cliff.
Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- DALL-E: Zero setup, works in a browser, good enough for casual stuff
- Kolors: Excellent portrait quality on the free tier, strong with faces
- Stable Diffusion: Unlimited generations, total control, massive community
- All three: You can try before committing money
❌ Cons
- DALL-E: Aggressive rate limits, plasticky look, hands still struggle
- Kolors: Poor English docs, smaller ecosystem, inconsistent results on non-portrait prompts
- Stable Diffusion: Requires hardware or technical patience, steep learning curve, can eat your weekend
Step-by-Step
- Figure out what you actually need: If you're making one image a week for a blog, use DALL-E and stop overthinking. If you're doing portraits or character art, try Kolors free first. If you need consistency across a project, commit to Stable Diffusion. Most people pick the wrong tool because they read a "best AI image generator" listicle instead of asking what they're making.
- Test each one with the same prompt: Write one specific prompt and run it through all three. Pay attention to hands, faces, and text rendering — those are where everything falls apart. Don't judge on one image, either. Run it five times and see how consistent each tool is. DALL-E varies wildly, Kolors is steadier on faces, SD depends entirely on your settings.
- Upscale before you use anything: AI images often come out softer than they look at thumbnail size. Run your final picks through an upscaler before dropping them into a project. It's a 30-second step that makes a massive difference in how "real" they look. This is the part everyone skips and then wonders why their images look fuzzy on a big screen.
Pro tip: Keep a prompt log. Seriously. When you finally get a good result after 40 tries, you will not remember what you typed. Copy it into a notes app immediately.
FAQ
Q: Is DALL-E actually free?
A: Not really. You get a handful of generations through ChatGPT's free tier, then it's subscription-only. The free version is a demo, not a tool.
Q: Which one is best for realistic portraits?
A: Kolors, hands down, especially for Asian faces. For Western portraits, Stable Diffusion with the right model edges it out. DALL-E is the weakest of the three here.
Q: Can I run Stable Diffusion without a good GPU?
A: You can use free cloud services like Google Colab, but you'll hit session limits and wait times. If your machine has less than 6GB VRAM, expect pain. A decent used GPU costs about as much as a year of Midjourney, so do the math on how much you'll actually use it.
Once you've got your images, run them through an upscaler at https://toolsail.com/upscaler/ — it's free and takes seconds.