The former is a wasteland, the latter is more popular than r/art (despite having 1% of subscribers, it has more active users at any given moment)
If you want something ready to use for a newbee, midjourney v4 crushes DALLE2 on both prompt comprehension and the images look far more beautiful.
If you are already into art, then StableDiffusion has a massive ecosystem of alternate stylized models (many which look incredible) and LORA plugins for any concept the base model doesn't understand.
DALLE2 is just a prototype that was abandoned by OpenAI, their main business is GPTs, DALLE was just a side hustle.
“Artistically pleasing” is often what people ask for.
> with the downside of it being locked away and somewhat expensive.
Those are enormous downsides. Even if DALL-E was better in some broadly relevant ways in the base model, SD’s free (gratis, at least) availability means the SD ecosystem has finetuned models (whether checkpoints or ancillary things like TIs, hypernetworks, LORAs, etc.) adapted to... lots of different purposes, and you can mix and match these to create your own models for your own specific purposes.
A web interface backed by strictly the base SD model (of any version) might lose to the same over DALL-E for uses where the set of tools in the SD ecosystem do not.
That being said, for a business use cases, where I want to give it a simple prompt and have a high chance of getting a good usable result, it’s not clear to me that stable diffusion is there yet. Many of the most exciting SD community results seem to be in anime and porn, which can be a bit hard to follow. I guess the use cases that I’m excited about are things like logo generators, blog post image generators, product image thumbnail generators for e-commerce, industrial design, etc.
But please prove me wrong! I’m excited for SD to be the state of the art, it’s definitely better in the long term that’s it’s so accessible. I‘m sure a good guide or blog post about what’s new in stable diffusion outside of anime generation would be an interesting read.