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Image generation comparison from February 2026

By In Technology

I spend a lot of time generating images these days for presentations. My typical workflow is fairly scientific: I ask Midjourney to produce a relatively cute image of a frog, a toad, a robot, or some other vaguely anthropomorphic creature doing something related to the slide I’m about to present.

Once I get the image, I expand the background by about 90% so the character ends up in the corner of the slide. That gives me a nice, relatively clean area to drop text on top. Sometimes I use Photoshop to do the expansion. Sometimes Midjourney cooperates. ChatGPT is actually pretty good at this too. Nano Banana is… enthusiastic. It tends to try a little too hard right now.

That’s fun and all. But the more interesting comparison isn’t cute amphibians. It’s boring enterprise diagrams.

Recently I had to generate some architecture visuals for an RFP response. Rather than suffer alone, I decided to turn it into a model comparison experiment.

Below is a slightly simplified (but very real-feeling) prompt I used. The company is fictional. The buzzwords are not:

Create a clean, executive-level architecture diagram titled “Closed-Loop Member Intelligence Platform.”

The layout should be 16:9 and structured left to right with a circular optimization loop surrounding the system.

On the left side, show multiple member touchpoints feeding into the platform:
- Website (class browsing, account login)
- Mobile App (workout tracking, push notifications)
- In-Club Kiosks (check-in terminals)
- Wearable Device Integrations (fitness trackers)

Label this section: “Member Interactions Across Digital & Physical Channels.”

All touchpoints should flow into a large central hub labeled:

“Unified Member Profile & Real-Time Event Engine”

Inside the central hub, include:

- Web SDK
- Mobile SDK
- API Gateway
- Event Streaming Layer
- Clickstream Data Capture
- CRM Data Sync
- Identity Resolution Engine

Include a small sub-caption:
“Event-level data unifies anonymous visitors and active members into a single dynamic profile.”

From the central hub, arrows should flow to a right-side activation layer labeled:

“Real-Time Engagement & Orchestration”

Include these outputs:

- Personalized Workout Recommendations
- Dynamic Class Availability Messaging
- Triggered Retention Offers
- Membership Upgrade Campaigns
- A/B Testing & Experimentation Engine

Surround the entire diagram with a circular arrow labeled:

“Continuous Optimization & Revenue Growth”

Along the circular loop, include metrics:

- Engagement
- Conversion
- Retention
- Lifetime Value

Design style should be modern, minimal, and suitable for an enterprise SaaS presentation.
Use neutral tones with one accent color to indicate data flow.
Avoid clutter.
Make the architecture clear and readable for both technical and executive audiences.

Here are the results.

ChatGPT

Clear winner for “looks like a human consultant made this at 11:30 p.m. before a board meeting.” The text was incredibly legible. The layout was balanced. The hierarchy made sense. It genuinely looked like something you’d expect in a mid-market SaaS pitch deck.

I even did a reverse image search on some of the icons. No exact matches. That suggests they were generated rather than assembled from some common icon pack. Which is pretty cool.

Claude

Claude did something interesting. Instead of just giving me a static diagram, it generated a React application that rendered the architecture visually inside its canvas. I should have guessed this is what that nerd would do… in fact I did guess, but whatever.

That has upsides. I can tweak the code. I can modify the layout. I can version control it. That’s appealing to the nerd in me.

But technically it failed the homework assignent. It wasn’t what I asked for. I asked for a diagram image. What I got was a React app that displayed a diagram that I had to screenshot.

That said, I actually liked the aesthetic. It felt a little more “me.” Slightly less textbook. Slightly more product-thinking.

Gemini (Nano Banana)

The undisputed champion of 2026 in image generation, nano banana, was actually my least favorite of all of the designs. I think there’s something really weird about the arrows on the outside ring of this diagram. Why are there two arrows between “Engagement” and “Conversion”? Why are they different sizes? I did actually find a couple of exact matches when searching for some of these icons here, so so there might be some assembly on top of generation going here, but I cannot tell because these icons are so universal that it’s likely that that could just be a coincidence.

Midjourney

Ah, Midjourney. My current favorite for keynote frogs.

Completely and utterly useless for generating readable diagrams.

It’s phenomenal at stylized imagery. I’ve tuned it so much over time that it practically knows my aesthetic preferences better than I do. It’s like it’s been trained specifically to make amphibians that align with my personality.

The Omni feature (object permanence) is genuinely impressive. If you’re telling a visual story and need a character to look consistent across multiple scenes, or you’re creating a children’s book to convince your six-year-old that haircuts are not a violation of human rights, it’s fantastic.

But enterprise architecture diagrams? Nope, sucksville.

Wrapping Up

I was pretty sure that nano banana was going to run away with this one. Everyone I know works in banking or finance or medicine has been telling me how great the model is for generating diagrams and process flows. They’ve been raving about how things that were not possible three months ago are now completely durable with this model. It was a little bit of a surprise to see that my personal favorite was good old-fashioned ChatGPT. I think, for my personal use, I’m probably going to use Claude to generate diagrams because they’re a lot easier for me to tweak once they’ve been generated.

That said, I think this experiment showed that when I do this kind of work in the future, I’m just going to load up the same prompt in three different models and just pick the one I like the most. Some of it’s going to be personal tastes; some of it’s going to be how well the model interpreted the prompt, and some of it’s going to be the state of that particular LLM and its model on that given week.

And I’m going to stick to only using Midjourney for generating cute pictures of toads.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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I Think I Broke Some Of My Team (A Little) With AI

In Technology

Last year I read Cal Newport’s really interesting book, Slow Productivity, and walked away with a couple of interesting ideas, and one that I started recommending to my direct reports: the visible backlog. The concept is simple. Let people see what’s actually on your plate so they can prioritize accordingly and not pile more on when you’re drowning. This could be as simple as a Word document that is shared with me, where I can see what people are working on next in order of priority.

I kind of thought I was doing that bit ok, but I started ramping up my AI tools heavily, and things have gotten complicated.

Here’s what happened. I trained some AI assistants on my past proposals, emails, contracts, the whole archive… like everyone probably has done by now. So naturally, I’ve become more and more efficient.

A proposal that used to take me half a day gets done in an hour. Contract redlines with three different risk levels can be done before lunch. Even my emails (god, the emails)… I just tell the bot what tone I’m going for, what I want the outcome to be, and it drafts something I’d normally spend ten minutes fussing over. Multiply that across a dozen emails and a few documents and I’m getting back two, maybe three hours a day.

It felt like a real advantage. I was keeping up the way I’d always wanted to but am probably to lazy to actually pull off.

The problem showed up slowly at first.

I’d send something to legal and get silence. Then more silence. Turns out they were still working through the last batch I’d sent. Marketing hadn’t made the four new web pages I’d drafted. My inbox started filling up with thoughtful replies to the thoughtful emails my AI had helped me write, replies I now actually had to read and respond to.

I had removed myself as the bottleneck. Which sounds great until you realize the bottleneck just moved downstream to everyone else, especially when you are the boss… People actually take what you send them seriously and really read it because it’s probably important, even if it’s not that important.

There’s a moment in Slow Productivity where Newport talks about not burning out. I remember reading that and thinking about my poor team. What I didn’t anticipate was that I might accidentally shift some of that pressure to other people.

So right now I’m thinking about what I actually need.

It’s not another tool to help me work faster. It’s like I need something that tells me when to hold off. Something that looks at my team’s calendars and workloads and says “hey, maybe don’t send that until Thursday when Sara’s actually finished the last thing you asked her to work on.” Some sort of reverse productivity assistant.

It should be pretty obvious that productivity isn’t a solo sport. All that efficiency I gained doesn’t mean much if the people around me can’t absorb it. This is similar to the problem with code reviewing AI generated pull requests all day long when you used to actually write code. I’m trying to slow down. It’s harder than it sounds when the tools make speed so easy. So obviously what I’m proposing here (maybe tongue-in-cheek) is an AI bot for each one of my direct reports that connects to their calendar and backlog. Every time I go to assign something to one of them, it is the thing that asks me where it is in the priority based on their current workload, meeting schedules, days off, etc. A bot in the loop of the human in the loop. I know I probably sound crazy, but I think I might try and build this.