Midjourney Still Wins Pretty. Ideogram Wins When You Need Words in the Picture.

Midjourney makes me stop scrolling. Ideogram makes me ship. I ran a 'cozy bookstore at night with a handwritten OPEN sign' prompt through both, and Midjourney produced something I'd frame; Ideogram produced something I could actually use on a poster because the sign said OPEN, not a glowing squiggle.

Midjourney's weakness is the same as its strength: it optimizes for beauty and treats text as noise to prettify. Every sign, label, and title I've asked it for came back as elegant gibberish. Ideogram treats text as a first-class object, so a book cover with a real title is finally possible without a designer cleaning up after the model.

For pure mood, mood boards, and 'wow' hero art, Midjourney is still my default. Its composition sense is a year ahead on taste. But the second the brief includes 'and the logo should say X,' I switch, because re-prompting Midjourney for legible text is a slot-machine I've lost too many credits on.

The honest cost of Ideogram is that its pretty is merely good, not arresting. A Midjourney background behind an Ideogram sign is the cheat I use most: take the beauty from one, the words from the other, composite in five minutes.

Verdict: Midjourney for the image that makes people feel, Ideogram for the image that tells them something. Need both in one frame? Generate separately and composite.