Stable Diffusion 3.5
Latest Stable Diffusion model with improved text rendering and composition.
About
Stable Diffusion 3.5 from Stability AI generates images from text prompts using a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture. The family ships in three open-weight variants: Large at 8 billion parameters, Large Turbo for faster distilled sampling, and Medium at 2.5 billion parameters, and the reference repository also runs SD3 Medium. Conditioning combines three text encoders, OpenAI CLIP-L/14, OpenCLIP bigG, and Google's T5-XXL, with a 16-channel VAE decoder, which improves text rendering, composition, and prompt adherence over SDXL. The inference code supports ControlNet guidance for blur, Canny edge, and depth conditioning, batch generation from prompt files, and a Skip Layer Guidance option for better coherency. The reference implementation code is MIT licensed while the weights fall under the Stability Community License, free for research and for smaller businesses. It is widely used by hobbyists on consumer GPUs with roughly 8 to 16 GB of VRAM and by teams integrating open image generation into products.
Should you use Stable Diffusion 3.5?
Pick it when
Pick SD 3.5 when you want better text rendering and prompt adherence than SDXL, a choice of sizes from 2.5B Medium to 8B Large plus a Turbo, and you are a researcher or smaller business on an 8 to 16 GB GPU.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if your company is past the Stability Community License's small-business limit, or you want the deepest LoRA ecosystem, which SDXL has. FLUX.1 schnell and Qwen-Image carry Apache-2.0 instead.
Alternatives to Stable Diffusion 3.5
- FLUX.1
Rectified flow model with Fill, Canny, depth, Redux, and Kontext editions; schnell is Apache-2.0 but dev is non-commercial, and it wants 12 GB.
- Stable Diffusion XL
Weaker text and composition, but an Open RAIL++ license with no business-size gate and many more fine-tunes and ControlNets.
- Chroma
Apache-2.0 8.9B base built for fine-tuning, a cleaner license for derivative models, but positioned as a neutral base rather than a polished checkpoint.
- Qwen-Image
Stronger paragraph-level text rendering under Apache-2.0, but 20B parameters versus 2.5B to 8B here.
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Details
- Category
- Image Generation
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- Stability Community
- Minimum VRAM
- 8 GB
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026