Just when we thought the positions in the list of the best AI image generators had all been taken, along comes a new contender apparently out of nowhere. Recraft, AKA Red Panda, offers a suite of tools and claims to be an “AI image generator for pro designers”.

That’s a position surely already claimed by Adobe Firefly. So what makes Recraft different? And what does it have to do with red pandas?

What is Recraft AI image generator AKA Red Panda?

The Red Panda AI image generator sprang to attention when it jumped to the top of the the Artificial Analysis Text-to-Image Model Leaderboard, a ranking on Hugging Face that gives AI image generators scores based on quality, speed and price. It turned out that Red Panda was a codename for Recraft V3, the latest AI model from a London-based company that was founded in 2022 but which had largely gone by under the radar.

Is Recraft really for ‘pro designers’? Well, I guess that’s a broad term. It will be useful for some people who need to create design assets.

Unlike most of the more cowboy AI image generators like Midjourney, it aims to provide a suite of tools that allow AI image generation to be used more precisely to create assets from product mockups to social media content. It looks like it’s aiming to compete with Adobe Express and Canva, providing more flexible and intuitive editing editing tools than straight image generators like Midjourney.

It can generate vectors as well as raster images, and, like Ideogram, Recraft is putting a big focus on the generation of accurate text rendering. Perhaps most uniquely, Recraft introduces the possibility of real-time collaboration, allowing peers to comment on projects on an infinite canvas. This is something that Adobe is working on in its Project Concept. Recraft has also launched an API, allowing businesses and developers to integrate it into their own systems.

Based on my very brief initial testing, Recraft does seem to handle prompts that call for text in images very well, perhaps even better than Ideogram, although it does still tend to have glitches in longer phrases. Photorealism doesn’t seem to be far behind Midjourney or Flux. Meanwhile, the model’s style options, from studio photo to engraving, aim to reduce the need to use long text prompts.

The mockup generator appears to be fairly usable if you need a quick demonstration of a concept. Recraft’s also plugging itself for AI logo generation.