Flux by Black Forest Labs

Flux is the image-generation family from Black Forest Labs, the company founded by the original creators of Stable Diffusion after they left Stability AI. The Flux models — Flux Pro, Flux Dev and Flux Schnell, plus newer Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra and Flux Kontext editing models — set the open-weights state of the art across photorealism, prompt adherence, anatomical accuracy and aesthetic quality, and they're the silent engine inside many other apps (Krea, Freepik, Mystic, Together AI, Replicate). What makes Flux strategically important is its open-weights philosophy: Schnell is Apache 2.0, Dev is non-commercial open, and Pro is API-only, giving builders a clear path from local experimentation to managed production. The official BFL API serves Flux at ~\$0.025–\$0.05 per image depending on tier, with structured-prompt support, image-to-image, inpainting, ControlNet and the newer Kontext model for natural-language image editing ('make her shirt blue, keep everything else the same'). For self-hosters, Flux Dev runs on a single 24GB GPU. Flux is the default choice when a team needs frontier image quality without the brand and policy constraints of OpenAI or Adobe and wants the option to bring weights in-house.