I gave 7 AI design tools the same 5 jobs on their free plans

Posted on Oct 16 • Originally published at fontvibe.ai • AI-assisted

Most "best AI font generator" lists I read were written from product pages. Very few show what the tools actually produced. So I picked five ordinary design jobs, typed the exact same prompt into each tool, took the first result, and scored it. Every image in this post is the raw output, and every prompt is printed so you can run it yourself.

One thing to clear up before the results. When people search "AI font generator", most of them don't want a.ttf file. They want a word to look a certain way on a finished thing: a thumbnail, an invitation, a shirt. That's a text effect on a design, and that's what all seven of these tools make. If you need an installable font, skip to the section on font files.

"Text errors" means a broken letter, a covered word or garbled text in the final image. Scores are out of 10.

The short version: the gap at the top is small. Leonardo finished 0.1 behind FontVibe, and on two of the five jobs it scored higher. Where the tools really split was whether they did the specific lettering effect the prompt asked for. More on that below.

Five jobs, from simple to hard. The difficulty is about the whole design: how much information it has to carry and how many layout rules it has to follow.

Every image got a score from 1 to 10 on four things. I wrote down the reason for each deduction before giving the number.

The total is calculated, not judged: 0.20 × legibility + 0.35 × design execution + 0.25 × layout + 0.20 × appeal, rounded to one decimal. This is the same rubric we use internally to rate designs made on FontVibe, written before this test.

Tested on October 12 and 13, 2026. These tools change every few weeks, and one try per job means luck plays a part. Treat the scores as a snapshot, not a verdict.

The prompt asked for "golden flaky lettering". Only FontVibe made letters that look like baked pastry. Microsoft Designer got close. Leonardo used a script with a light pastry texture and added a shop name and a tagline on its own. Ideogram, Canva and Firefly all went with plain gold type, which looks fine but ignores the brief. Recraft's agent made four images; one spelled Saturday as "Savrdary", and the agent spotted it and dropped it itself.

This job has one layout rule: keep the right third empty for a face. FontVibe, Leonardo and Recraft followed it and made convincing ice. Firefly made the best looking ice of the group but put the cabin in the right third. Canva and Designer kept the space clear but used white distressed letters with no ice at all. Ideogram's ice was good, but the L in ALONE nearly disappears into the background, so at thumbnail size it reads "A ONE".

Leonardo won this one. It put the date, place and RSVP on a card with small icons, which is what a parent would actually print. Designer was close behind. FontVibe's balloon letters were strong, but the date sits at the top and the venue at the bottom, split by a big balloon "7". Firefly wrote the date as "SATOV, 14" and invented an address, a phone number and an email. Canva used glitter type rather than balloon letters.

The hard part here is "isolated on plain white so I can send it to the printer". Recraft was the only tool that returned a vector file, which a print shop can use as is. Canva and FontVibe made proper wildstyle lettering with drips and the moon. Firefly's lettering was excellent, but it drew the design on a T-shirt mockup, so it isn't a print file. Designer's wildstyle is so tangled that NIGHTSHIFT is hard to read. Ideogram's drips run over the "AFTER DARK CLUB" line.

A note on FontVibe here, since I make it. My first request was routed to its single-image template mode, which produced a graffiti wall and missed the white background and the moon. I then asked in the same chat for design concepts and scored that result. The template mode isn't a design flow, so I didn't count it, but you should know it happened. We're changing the routing so a request like this goes to design concepts first.

The hardest job, and the closest race. Leonardo and Firefly both nailed molten fire type, burning trees and six lines of information in a clear order. FontVibe was close; its secondary lines are all one size, so the special guests line doesn't stand out. Ideogram's layout was one of the best, but it printed a garbled word, "SSCIDU", above the date. Canva's band name is a red outline face, not fire.

FontVibe reads the brief and shows you three design concepts first: layout, lettering, colours and the lines of text it plans to use. You pick one, fill in anything missing (like a shop name), and it renders. It was the only tool that did the requested lettering effect on all five jobs, with no text errors.

Where it lost points: the invitation layout split the details, the poster's secondary text had no hierarchy, and the T-shirt request first went to the wrong mode. It's also not the fastest: about two minutes from prompt to image, including the concept step. A design cost me 33 credits (6 for concepts, 27 to render); with the cheapest image model it's 23. The free plan gives you 30 credits a day, up to 200 a month. Commercial use is allowed on every plan, including free.

Good for: anyone who cares that the lettering looks exactly like what they asked for.

Leonardo's "Auto" model picked GPT Image 2 for all five jobs, and the free plan gives you that. Images came back in 30 to 40 seconds for 8 tokens each, so 150 daily tokens go a long way. It won the invitation and tied for the poster. It missed on the T-shirt, where it drew a simple black tag instead of wildstyle. Free images are public; private generation is a paid feature. The first try at the invitation was blocked by its content filter (I suspect the word "daughter"), with tokens refunded; the same prompt went through on retry.

Good for: high quality one-off images if you're happy with less control over the lettering style.

Recraft's chat agent runs one or two rounds on its own, checks spelling and layout, and tells you which image it thinks is best and why. It flagged two misspelled images on its own and told me not to use them. It's also the only tool that gave me a vector file for the shirt. The trade off is cost: each job used 6 to 13 credits because the agent decides how many rounds to run, and the free plan can't choose the image count. Recraft's own pricing page says free plan images are owned by Recraft, shown publicly and not licensed for commercial use.

Good for: logos and print work where a vector file matters, if you're on a paid plan.

Firefly's home page defaults to Google's Gemini 3.1 model (Nano Banana 2), not Adobe's own Firefly model; you have to switch in the menu if you want the one Adobe calls commercially safe. I left the default. It produced the best ice and one of the best posters, but it added information nobody asked for and broke the invitation date. The free plan gave me three images a day on this model. Adobe doesn't publish the number.

Good for: polished, photographic scenes. Check every line of text.

The simplest interface here: describe, pick a colour palette, pick one of three sizes. It was also the slowest, at 1.5 to 2 minutes per image, and it only offers square, 2:3 and 3:2, so there's no true 16:9 thumbnail. Its invitation was the second best of the group; its T-shirt lettering was hard to read. 15 free credits a month, one per image.

Good for: occasional use when you don't want to learn anything.

Canva AI returns an editable Canva design, not a flat image, which is a real advantage if you want to change a word later. Layout and information were solid on every job, with no text errors. But it used ordinary fonts from its library and ignored the lettering effect in four of five jobs (pastry, ice, balloons, fire). It did make good wildstyle for the shirt. On the free plan, five designs used 77% of my monthly AI allowance.

Good for: people who already design in Canva and will edit the result by hand.

Ideogram was the fastest, at 20 to 30 seconds, and its layouts often looked the most professional. But three of five images had text problems: a vanishing letter, drips over a line of text, and a garbled word. Its "Magic Prompt" is on by default and adds details on its own, which helped the bakery post and changed the lettering I asked for. The account showed 30 credits on the free plan, with low quality images at 3 credits each.

Good for: fast drafts where you'll check and fix the text yourself.

None of the seven tools above make an installable font. If that's what you need, I tried Mixfont, which does.

I asked for a bold, bubbly display font for the same birthday invitation. Two minutes and 20 of my 50 free credits later, it gave me a TTF file I could install. The letters are consistent across upper case, lower case and numbers, and a long word like "Extraordinary" sets cleanly. The standard tier has 72 glyphs, so some symbols are missing (there was no & or £). An extended set with 319 glyphs costs 50 credits.

A font file and a text effect solve different problems. A font is for typing many words over and over. A text effect is for one word that has to look a particular way on one design.

For comparison, I also tried TextStudio, a long-running template based text effect site that doesn't use AI. You pick an effect and type your words. The free "Frosty" template turned "100 DAYS ALONE" into a clean icy line of text on a snowy background. That's all it does: one line, one style, no cabin, no layout. The fire template was a premium one and covered in "PREMIUM" watermarks, and the pages carry a lot of ads.

Two things from this test go straight onto our list. A request with print rules, like "white background" and "a moon graphic", should go to design concepts, not the single-image template. And our secondary text needs clearer hierarchy on information heavy designs like posters and invitations. If you want to check our results against your own job, FontVibe's design mode is here.

Legibility / design execution / layout / appeal, then the weighted total.

The raw images, input screenshots and my written deductions for every score are kept on file. If you run one of these prompts and get something very different, email me at hello@fontvibe.ai and I'll add it to this post.