Recraft

There are two things to consider: whether you need a file editable after generation, and whether you are ready to pay in dollars for the right to own the image.

Who it is for. For people making not just an image but a design: a logo, a set of icons in one style, a print-ready illustration, packaging artwork. The vector comes as an SVG file and is editable by nodes directly on the canvas, a custom style is set with ten images without training, and a mockup on a T-shirt or box is assembled in the same window.

Who else. For people who want one window for every model: alongside its own V4.1, it includes Nano Banana, GPT Image, Flux, and a dozen others, plus video through third-party models on Pro. Also for developers, because there is an API with per-image billing and an MCP server for Claude Code and Cursor.

Who it is not for. For those who want to use it for free at work: images on the free plan belong to Recraft, are visible to everyone, and cannot be sold; subscribing later does not buy them out.

Good fit: section 3 guides you from sign-in to your first vector. If you are choosing between it and Midjourney, see the decision guide in section 7.

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Three layers: an image and vector generator with its own model, an editor with a canvas, styles, and mockups, and a marketplace of third-party models, including video.

Vector. A prompt becomes an SVG file, not an image: lines, fills, and letters remain separate objects, and since Jul 9, 2026 their nodes can be edited directly in the editor, without Illustrator. The V4.1 Vector model draws such a file in 11–12 seconds for 4 credits, Pro Vector for 12. Vector generation and its editor are available on every plan, including the free one.

Vectorization. A finished photo can also be converted to vector, but the vendor warns that photos and 3D produce artifacts; the format works with simple shapes.

Images and styles. Its V4.1 lineup is split into the standard 1K and Pro 2K versions, expressive models, and Utility for mockups and product photos with even lighting. A custom style is set from one reference image or ten, without training, and since Aug 26, 2026 this is handled by a separate V4 Styles family. The older V3 and V2 are still available: the vendor recommends V3 when you need precise text placement in the image, while V2 retains rare styles.

Third-party models. Since Apr 2, 2025, the same selector has included models from other companies: GPT Image, Nano Banana, Flux, and eight more families, each with its own credit price from 1 to 40. They are available only in the editor and only on paid plans; they are not available through the API. The full list is in the questions below.

Edits and mockups. An image is edited with words, the background can be removed or replaced, the eraser deletes an object, and upscaling has two modes: Crisp for 1 credit without inventing details and Creative for 20 with added details. Any image can be placed on a T-shirt or box mockup for 2 credits. Chat mode with context memory builds a series of images from one description, while Design Agent, since Jul 29, 2026, returns a set of about 12 elements from one prompt: a logo, palette, app icon, and posts.

Lettering. V4.1 renders Latin text reliably, and the vendor promises “multi-language text”.

Video. Recraft has no video model of its own; videos are made by Sora, Veo, Kling, Seedance, and five other third-party models, only on Pro and Teams, with pricing per second: from 7 to 142 credits. Two thousand Pro credits buy 14–40 seconds of footage, by our calculation using the vendor's prices.

What the vendor itself shows. The video in the header comes from the recraft.ai homepage; it is an excerpt from a six-minute screen recording: the prompt “Freckled redhead girl portrait,” four portraits on the canvas, an aspect-ratio picker, and a right-side panel with edits, reuse, and export. We did not run Recraft ourselves for this task; the figures come from the help center, marketplace, terms, and third-party tests.

Step 1. Open recraft.ai and sign in with email, Google or Apple, no password needed. In 2025, users saw a “service unavailable in your region” notice; by September 2026, the test no longer finds it.

Step 2. Choose a generation type, Image or Vector, select a model, and write a prompt; the vendor promises more accurate results in English. The free plan gives you two images per prompt and three generations per style per day.

Step 3. To make the images yours and private, you need a subscription starting at $12 a month. The vendor takes only dollars through Stripe and Google Pay, so you will need  . The storefront opens on the annual tab by default, where $10 a month means $120 up front for the year; the monthly price lives behind the toggle.

Apps. Android: a million downloads on Google Play, version 8.0 required. iPhone: the app is in the App Store. There is no desktop app; vector, mockups and teamwork live on the website.

Plugins. Figma, Framer, the Chrome extension, and Google Docs and Slides add-ons use credits from the same account; vectors cannot be generated in Google Docs, and the vendor directs users to the website for them. There are no plugins for Photoshop or Canva. Developers get an API and MCP server, with Claude Code connection available through one command from the documentation.

Steps verified on Sep 6, 2026 using the live recraft.ai marketplace, vendor help center, an access test from a Moscow node, a blocked-domain registry export, and app-store listings

In fall 2024, the Recraft model was first in the world; as of Sep 6, 2026, its best model ranks 26th on the Artificial Analysis arena and 21st on LMArena.

Arenas. On Artificial Analysis, Recraft V4.1 Utility ranks highest among 157 models, at 26th with a rating of 1018 versus 1178 for the leading GPT Image 2. On LMArena, in the table dated Sep 4, 2026, recraft-v4.1-utility-pro ranks 21st out of 76 models with 1169 versus 1382 for gpt-image-2, but it has 2.5 thousand votes while the older V3 has 192 thousand. In its May 30, 2026 release, the vendor called V4.1 Utility Pro fifth; in three months the arena moved on. V3, which held first place on Oct 30, 2024 with a rating of 1172, is now 107th on the same arena with 874.

What this means. The 2024 first place is no myth: the anonymous red_panda overtook Midjourney, Flux, and OpenAI in four days, and TechCrunch reported a 40-point lead. Since then, every vendor has released new generations, while Recraft measures itself not by image beauty but by vector output and brand style, which the arenas do not measure. The word “best” will not appear here.

Demand. The place among image tools is shown under the card title, and the full tool ranking lives on the shared page.

Entry costs $12 a month, not the $10 shown in the listing: it opens to the annual tab by default. There is a free plan, but it buys rights rather than images.

Credits. A subscription provides a monthly credit balance that expires at the end of the month. A V4.1 vector costs 4 credits, Pro Vector 12; background removal, vectorization, and standard upscaling cost 1 each, generative upscaling 20, a mockup 2; third-party models range from 1 for Flux to 40 for Nano Banana Pro in 4K. The vendor does not publish the price of a standard image from its own models in its help center; the app listing shows 2 credits for V4.1 and 10 for V4.1 Pro.

Free. A daily credit balance, whose amount the vendor removed from the listing in July 2026; in June it showed 30 a day. Two images per prompt, three generations per style a day, three uploads of your own images, Recraft models only. All images are public, belong to Recraft, and cannot be used commercially, but vectors and the vector editor are available.

Basic and Pro. Basic for $12 a month or $10 when paid annually provides 1,000 credits, third-party models, privacy, and rights, roughly 250 V4.1 Vector images. Pro for $20 or $16 provides 2,000 credits and video; the 4K, 8K, and 16K tiers cost $40, $80, and $160. Teams starts at $22 per seat. Top-ups come in packages at $0.01 per credit, do not expire, and are available to paid users only.

API. A separate wallet: $1 equals 1,000 units, prepaid with no refunds and no expiration date; a key is issued with a non-zero balance. A standard V4.1 image costs $0.035, V4 Pro $0.25, a vector $0.08, a Pro vector $0.30, vectorization and background removal $0.01 each. Third-party models and video are unavailable through the API.

Refund. Only at the vendor's discretion, and only if the payment is less than 30 days old and fewer than 30 credits have been used over the account's lifetime. This is exactly what nearly all the one-star Trustpilot reviews are about.

Three questions: whose images are these, what does the vendor do with your prompts, and who is behind it?

Whose images. On paid plans, they are yours: terms dated Aug 11, 2026 give you all rights, including commercial rights, and they remain yours after you cancel. On the free plan, it is the opposite: images belong to Recraft, you irrevocably transfer rights to it, publish them in the public gallery, and cannot use them commercially. A subscription does not retroactively buy them out; the vendor states this explicitly, and the rule has applied since 12.08.2024. The only restriction for everyone: you cannot train your own neural networks on the results.

Your prompts. Training on your input and results is enabled by default for free and paid accounts; it can be disabled with the “Help improve Recraft” toggle in the profile, but the help center says opting out is unavailable on the free plan, disabled by default for teams, and API data is never used for training. The terms nevertheless promise everyone an opt-out “at any time,” while the help center denies it to free users; two vendor documents contradict each other.

Who is behind it. The company was registered in the US in 2022, the headquarters is in London, and disputes go under the law of the State of New York. The founder is Anna Veronika Dorogush: per the company's release the author of CatBoost, per TechCrunch a former head of machine learning at Yandex. The money is American and European: $12M from Khosla Ventures and Nat Friedman in January 2024, $30M from Accel in May 2025, with NVIDIA joining the round later.

Data. Stored with contractors in the US and EU; SOC 2 Type 2 and AIUC-1 certified.

Lawsuits and reviews. The vendor does not disclose what the base model was trained on, and no copyright-holder lawsuits against Recraft had been found as of 06.09.2026. Trustpilot gives it 1.7 from 29 reviews; the vendor has not claimed the profile and has not replied. Nearly all one-star reviews concern unrefunded payments; Midjourney scores 1.6 from 373 on the same platform. Product Hunt gives it 4.8 from 37, and Google Play 4.6 from 3.2 thousand.

The choice is not about who draws more beautifully, but what you take away: an editable file or a finished image.

For a post built from a photo that needs a background, a caption and a template, there is the Picsart photo editor. Its terms for generations and library assets are covered separately.

To edit a photo or build a collage, compare Recraft with the Fotor editor. It combines source editing, captions and generation, while a vector file is worth choosing for a separate task.

File or image. Midjourney delivers a finished image and charges for the visual appeal of the image; it has no editable file. Recraft delivers an SVG with nodes, an icon set in one style, and a mockup - work that would need to be finished in Illustrator with Midjourney. The vendor itself compares it with Midjourney in a blog post from 30.04.2026.

One checkout. Both charge in dollars through Stripe. Midjourney starts at $10 with no free trial, Recraft at $12 with a free plan, but free images belong to the vendor. Only Recraft has a phone app.

Who else is nearby. Ideogram is strong at in-image text, and its V4 is available directly in Recraft for 4–17 credits, as is Nano Banana from Gemini.

Vectors are not a monopoly. Besides Recraft, two others also create vectors from descriptions. Adobe's Firefly Vector model lives inside Illustrator, and Creative Cloud Pro costs $69.99 per month after the promo. And QuiverAI has delivered SVG as the only output of its Arrow models since September 2026, with no raster alongside it, and starts at $8 per month according to the vendor's pricing as of 17.09.2026.

Over three years, the product went from a vector generator on Product Hunt, through first place in the global arena, to a studio that sells third-party models alongside its own.