1. Bing Image Creator

Ease of Use: 4.5/5
Bing Image Creator is incredibly simple. You type a prompt, click "Create," and in about 30 seconds, you're presented with four variations. Once you pick your favourite, you can download it with a single click. It does require creating a free account to generate unlimited images, which is a small inconvenience.

Speed: 4/5
It generates 4 design variations in about 30 seconds, which is fairly quick. However, there’s no option to modify a design once it’s generated, and re-creating with the same prompt often yields very different results.

Art Quality: 4/5
Bing Image Creator excels at generating high-quality, realistic, and digital art. It's particularly strong with detailed designs based on simple prompts. For a t-shirt design, this could be ideal for creating clean, visually striking images.

Text Generation: 2/5
While it does a good job with images, its text generation leaves much to be desired. Words are often jumbled or incorrectly spelled, which can make it unsuitable for designs that include significant text.

Prompt Adherence: 3/5
Bing often interprets prompts loosely. For example, a request for "a family with 2 parents and 3 kids" might end up with an image of 7 kids. Its flexibility can be a pro, but it may also require multiple attempts to get the desired result.

2. Stable Diffusion 3.5

Ease of Use: 4/5
Stable Diffusion is user-friendly, and like Bing, you only need to enter your prompt and hit "Run." After creating a free account, you can generate unlimited images, but it only provides a single design per prompt, unlike other tools that generate multiple options.

Speed: 2/5
The tool takes about 1 minute to generate a single image, which is slower than some other options. If you’re looking to quickly generate multiple designs, this could be a drawback.

Art Quality: 3.5/5
The art quality is good, but not as polished as some other tools. It shines when detailed prompts are provided, but can fall short on more general ones. It's great for generating trendy or media-based designs, but may need some refinement for t-shirt-ready images.

Text Generation: 4/5
Stable Diffusion performs well with text, handling longer phrases and complex fonts. If your design features significant text, this tool excels where others may struggle.

Prompt Adherence: 3/5
While Stable Diffusion generally follows prompts well, it occasionally misses details. For instance, in a prompt about "3 dogs all wearing Santa hats," it may generate only 2 dogs with hats.

3. Ideogram.ai

Ease of Use: 4/5
Ideogram.ai is simple to use, offering a prompt input system that also allows for remixing existing images. The platform has a social-media-like interface for sharing designs, which makes it both fun and engaging. One downside is that users can only create 20 free images per day, which is only 5 prompts with 4 variations each.

Speed: 4/5
It generates 4 images from one prompt in about 30 seconds, which is on par with Bing Image Creator. It’s quick, and the option to remix designs further enhances the creative process.

Art Quality: 4.5/5
Ideogram.ai stands out for its beautiful, high-quality artwork. You can select different colour palettes, art styles, and aspect ratios, making it highly versatile for t-shirt designs. It generates images with rich background details even without a specific prompt for them.

Text Generation: 4.5/5
Ideogram handles text exceptionally well. It not only generates accurate text, but also automatically uses relevant styles (like bold, colourful fonts) that match the tone of your design.

Prompt Adherence: 4/5
Ideogram is accurate in following most prompts. However, it sometimes makes small errors, such as incorrectly identifying dog breeds, but these are easy to overlook considering the overall art quality.

4. Recraft.ai

Ease of Use: 3.5/5
Recraft.ai offers a range of features beyond simple AI image generation, which can make the interface a bit tricky to navigate at first. However, it’s fairly intuitive, with action buttons clearly displayed at the top to easily start new projects. After creating a free account, you’re given 50 credits daily, which allows you to generate 25 images (two designs per prompt).

Speed: 4/5
In about 30 seconds, Recraft.ai generates two designs, making it a fast option for a free tool. You can further refine and regenerate these designs to better match your original concept, giving you flexibility in the creative process.

Art Quality: 4/5
Recraft.ai excels when following detailed prompts exactly. It will create exactly what’s described, but it doesn’t add extra flair. For instance, if you prompt it to generate a “detailed drawing of a black cat eating a bowl of ramen,” you’ll get a plain bowl of ramen with a black cat. To add more detail, like egg, green onions, and pork, you’ll need to specify those elements in your prompt. Overall, this tool lacks creativity and is best suited for experienced creators who have a clear vision of what they want to design.

Two standout features of Recraft.ai are its free PNG downloads and background remover tool. Unlike other tools, which often offer JPG downloads that may result in lower quality, Recraft.ai lets you download high-quality PNG files. The background remover tool is especially useful, as it allows you to easily extract the design’s background without needing another graphic design tool, like Canva, making it perfect for preparing designs for t-shirts.

Text Generation: 4/5
For short text (a few words), Recraft.ai performs exceptionally well at generating accurate text. It even allows you to adjust the text’s color, saturation, brightness, contrast, and opacity in the image. However, it struggles with longer text, as evidenced by its inability to correctly generate “Unleash Your Creativity, Define Your Style.”

Prompt Adherence: 4.5/5
Recraft.ai generally excels at sticking closely to the details provided in prompts. It includes all parts of a multi-instruction prompt, from specific text to background details. The only issue we encountered was with numerical tasks, like including 5 photos of a dog in a collage. In some cases, it only generated 3 photos.

5. FLUX 1.1

Ease of Use: 3/5
FLUX 1.1 offers a simple, user-friendly platform with a large text box for entering your prompt and a prominent ‘create’ button. The generated image appears in a box on the right side of the screen. With a free account, users receive 20 credits to start, which allows for 10 free images. After the credits are used, a starter paid account costs $6.90 per month for 500 credits. Each prompt generates only one image. While there is a large ‘download image’ button below the output image, we encountered an error message in Chinese when attempting to download our image. As a result, we were only able to screenshot our AI-generated images, causing a loss of points in this area.

Speed: 0/5
Each design is supposed to take between 10-80 seconds to generate, but it took 2 minutes for each of our images. FLUX explained that the longer generation time was due to high user traffic. Since only one design is generated per prompt, and there is no option to modify the design, FLUX performs poorly in terms of speed.

Art Quality: 2/5
Out of our 10 free images, FLUX was able to generate only 4 successfully. The remaining 6 images produced a blank “converted image” with no visible design or downloadable content. The images that did work were quite basic, lacking detailed elements or backgrounds. We would only recommend FLUX for simple designs or for users who have a clear, specific vision of what they want to create.

Text Generation: 3/5
FLUX 1.1 generates text accurately and in an aesthetically pleasing way. The text complements the overall style of the image — for instance, it used a thin-line font to match the minimalist design of the "No Bad Trails, Just Bad Knees" concept. While FLUX didn't produce any typos or jumbled words, it didn’t always follow detailed font instructions. For example, it couldn't add dripping blood to a cat paws (Jaws-inspired) design.

Prompt Adherence: 3/5
FLUX 1.1 adheres well to simple prompts with straightforward instructions. It performs well with basic, one-sentence prompts suited for simple t-shirt designs. However, when given more creative or complex prompts, the tool falls short. It often misses certain details or secondary elements that require more intricate execution.