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🦉 WE READ 131 OWNER COMMENTS
Adobe Firefly: what owners actually say
Owners find Firefly convenient for quick fixes and exploration but repeatedly hit its lack of advanced control and custom training compared to free alternatives like ComfyUI.
What owners complain about
- Far less capable than ComfyUI COMMON
Multiple owners describe Firefly as a 'family sedan' compared to ComfyUI as a 'Formula One car.' One user says Firefly is 'almost unusable except for minor fills.' Another notes ComfyUI is free while Firefly charges per attempt.
- No custom dataset or LoRA training SOME
Owners report being unable to train their own datasets or use custom LoRAs, which one user calls 'foundational to all work done with generative AI art' and says makes consistency and flexibility 'impossible.'
- Pay-per-attempt burns credits on failures SOME
Users are frustrated paying for failed generations. One spent 'over an hour and thousands of credits' trying to get a simple image animation without success. Another says 'I really hate that I have to pay for Firefly to do it wrong' and wants Adobe to only charge upon downloading.
- Training data partly AI-generated COMMON
Adobe confirmed ~5% of Firefly's training images were generated by other AI platforms. Owners and commenters widely view this as a quality degradation risk, describing it as a 'copy of a copy' problem that compounds over iterations.
- Ethical training claims questioned SOME
Despite Adobe marketing Firefly as ethically trained, users note Adobe Stock contributors' work was still used without individual consent, and the 'ethical' label is seen as serving corporate data interests rather than individual creators.
What owners love
- Photoshop Remove Tool is excellent
Even owners who rarely use Firefly for generation specifically praise the Remove Tool in Photoshop as the one feature they consistently rely on.
- Fast for early exploration and ideation
Owners say Firefly excels at the 'blank page' phase, getting you '1/2 to 3/4 of the way there in mere minutes' and cutting hours of work down to minutes when properly tuned.
- Markup and image seed tools help fix outputs
Users highlight the markup/remove tools and image seed features as genuinely useful ways to iterate on and correct images within Firefly.
- Evolving into a full workflow studio
One owner notes Firefly has grown beyond simple image generation into 'an entire AI studio,' with Firefly Graph offering a ComfyUI-like workflow-driven experience they consider comparable.
Surprising patterns
- Several owners primarily use Firefly for just one narrow tool — the Photoshop Remove Tool — rather than for generative image creation, suggesting its standalone generation is less valued than its integration features.
- One user reports better prompt results from ChatGPT at the same $20/month price point, suggesting Firefly's prompt interpretation may lag behind even non-specialist AI tools.
- Owners who defend Firefly's token-based pricing point out Midjourney and Gemini charge the same way, implying the resentment is less about the model and more about perceived value for money given quality gaps.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Users who need custom-trained models, LoRA support, or fine-grained control over generative output should skip Firefly and look at ComfyUI or similar free, open tools instead.
Synthesised from 131 real owner comments across 4 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →