Midjourney, Ideogram, Adobe Firefly, Canva and Leonardo can all make ad and social images. Here is what to check on commercial use, privacy and ownership before you publish.
Nathan Vegh8 min read
You need a hero image for a landing page, six variations for a social ad, and a designer is not on the budget. An AI image tool will give you all of it in an afternoon. The harder question is whether you are allowed to use what it makes.
Most businesses never read the terms. They pick the tool with the nicest results, publish, and find out later that the free plan made their images public, or that the licence has a condition their company now fails. None of this is a reason to avoid the tools. It is a reason to spend ten minutes on the rules before you spend an hour on prompts.
This post covers five tools we list: Midjourney, Ideogram, Adobe Firefly, Canva and Leonardo AI. It draws on our own reviews, the vendors' pages we could open, and the US Copyright Office. Sources, and the pages that blocked us, are listed at the end.
Quick answer: for work you will publish under your brand, use a paid plan, not a free one, and read the commercial terms for the exact plan. Adobe Firefly gives the most specific account of how its models were trained. Ideogram suits images with readable text. Midjourney suits distinctive visuals, with a plan condition for larger companies. Canva is the easiest if you already design there. Whichever you pick, you may own the file without owning a copyright in it, so do not build a brand asset, such as a logo, on a raw AI image.
Before comparing tools, ask three things of each one.
Can I use the output commercially on my plan? Many tools allow it on paid plans and restrict it on free ones. Some attach a condition, such as company size. The answer belongs to the exact plan you will be on, not the tool in general.
Are my images public? Several tools publish free-plan images to a community gallery. If you are drafting a campaign or an unreleased product shot, public by default is a problem. Private generation is usually a paid feature.
What happens if someone says the image copies their work? Training data is contested, and tools differ in how they answer. A few offer legal cover on certain plans. Most do not.
Our review calls it good for distinctive, high-quality images, on the web and in Discord. The catch is that images are public by default on the lower plans, private generation sits on the higher ones, and fast generation uses a monthly allowance that does not roll over. There is no free trial.
On rights, we could not open Midjourney's own terms from our environment. A summary of them by a legal publisher says paid subscribers own the assets they create, free users get a non-commercial licence, and companies above a stated annual revenue threshold must be on the Pro or Mega plan. If your business is above that line, a lower plan may not cover you. Read the current terms before relying on this summary.
Ideogram is good for images that contain readable text, which matters for posters, social tiles and ad creative with a headline. Its FAQ says that on the free plan and the legacy Basic plan, everything you generate is public. On paid plans, other people see an image only once you publish it to the community. It also says that if you cancel, new images become public again unless your plan includes private generation.
On commercial use the FAQ does not give a rule. It says the answer depends on Ideogram's Terms of Service and tells you to read them first. Secondary sources we found disagree about the free plan, so treat free-plan images as unsuitable for client or campaign work until you have read the terms yourself.
Adobe Firefly is the tool to look at if your main worry is where the training material came from. Adobe's Firefly page says its models are commercially safe and are trained on licensed content from Adobe Stock and public domain content where copyright has expired. It also says Adobe does not train on users' personal or generated content, and that outputs carry Content Credentials showing how a file was made.
That applies to Adobe's own models. Firefly also offers partner models, and the page lists them under a separate filter from the commercially safe one. Our review adds two catches: video, audio and partner models draw on a monthly allowance that does not roll over, and cover against intellectual property claims depends on your plan. Ask Adobe for that cover in writing. We could not find the plan list on a public Adobe page we could open.
Canva is the practical pick if your team already builds social posts, presentations and flyers there. The AI image tools sit inside the same editor, so there is no export and re-upload step. Our review says the catch is that all the AI tools draw from one shared monthly allowance, so heavy use can run it out fast, and plan details differ between sources.
Canva's own help and terms pages blocked us, so we cannot quote its rules on output rights. Use the same approach as for the others: find the AI product terms and the content licence, and check them for the plan you are on, particularly if you plan to put AI-made designs on products you sell.
Leonardo AI makes images and video with editing tools, and is now owned by Canva. Our review warns that free creations are public, daily tokens do not carry over, and sources disagree on who owns free-plan output. That last point is the one to resolve before you use anything commercially. Its own pages were not readable from our environment, so we have not described its licence.
This is the catch under every tool above, and it does not depend on the vendor.
A terms page can say you own what you generate. That is a contract between you and the vendor. It does not decide whether copyright law protects the image. The US Copyright Office's report on copyrightability concluded that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make a user the author of the output. It said prompts function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas, though human-authored elements, such as your own editing and arrangement, can be protected.
Australia has its own law and we are not giving legal advice. The practical point holds anyway: if a competitor copies an AI image you published, you may have less power to stop them than you would with a photograph you commissioned. So:
Run this list on any image that carries your name:
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