pony for nsfw, flux for sfw. i have ~10 pony models i run a prompt through to pick what i like best, mix of realism + anime ones. sd1.5/sdxl are also great, tons of loras and really artistic checkpoints, just kinda moved on from them because of their inconsistency with hands/feet and difficulty doing good nsfw. More on reddit.com

Very broad question. Very very very broad question. For example, if you want to make depth images without a reference image, then depthstyle is the best model. If you want general recs, i'll give you a list of my most used models. RMSDXL Orion, Aries, Corvus, Scorpius. These are my versatile workhorse models. I generally always start with these, moving on to the others if i want something specific. AnimaginexlV3, best XL anime model. Good prompt adherence. Cheyenne_v14, just started using it but it's awesome western comicbook style. Envy Gacha, if you like that over the top fashion anime style. JuggernautXLv8, i like this one for close ups. realstockphoto_v2 combined with bad quality lora for realism. Those are all XL, I occasionally use 1.5 but i'm not as well versed with them. I mostly use 1.5 for LORAs. Mistoon anime has that screenshot of a tv show look. 3danimationdiffusion for a pixar vibe. Juggernautaftermath, wafflemix, realismfromhades for realism. And then several more you'd have to find on your own. Note some of these might not be the "best" but they do the job i want them to do. Took a lot of hoarding and testing to figure that out though, so good luck with it. More on reddit.com

So here's the history SD 1.4 -- the first model launched in August 2022 . . . obsolete now, no one uses it SD 1.5 -- the first widely adopted model. Still useful today, particularly useful on less powerful computers, low memory GPUx; models were typically 2 gigabytes or so. Training and render size was small, typically 640 x512, typically, so you need to use upscalers. Still useful in particular cases, its fast, its small and in particular use cases its actually best. ControlNets seem to work better with SD 1.5 than SDXL or Flux . . . SD 2 & 2.1 -- basically failures. Not much used, no reason to SDXL -- a big jump up, trained on and generates natively in 1024 x 1024. Models are typically 6 gigabytes (FP 32 versions of these do exist, useful in training new checkpoints, but not for inference). I still use SDXL a lot, usually on the Fooocus UI. There are also two SDXL derivatives worth mentioning, Pony and now Illustrious. These are based on SDXL, but have been tweaked enough that they respond to prompts quite differently, have their own LORAs and so on. The big advantages of these models is that they respond to text prompting better than base SDXL does, particularly for posing . . . if you're trying to describe, say, acrobats or athletics, Pony or Illustrious models will likely respond better to something like "orc grabbing kangaroo by the tail and swinging it". Pony and Illustrious both started out as anime/manga oriented models, but there are realistic variations. Also in the SDXL family, there's SDXL Turbo and Lightning, designed for speed, which make posslble realtime implementations (eg you draw something on the screen and you get an AI'd version of the brush stroke -- Kreia is a great implementation of this, and you can get some implementations in ComfyUI on the desktop, if you have a good GPU). SD 3 -- failure, little used. SD 3.5, much better than 3 fixed some of its glaring errors. If it were competing with SDXL, then there might be some interest . . . but its not . . . the state of the art is FLUX -- built by Black Forest Labs, the team that originally developed Stable Diffusion, FLUX is state of the art. In the "Schnell" variant it can be very quick, in the "Dev" variant, at the cost of slow speed and huge models (11 gigabytes and up), the quality is excellent, rivaling and exceeding Midjourney. Training LORAs is incredibly easy with FLUX Gym . . . for most users, IFF they have an adequate GPU (Nvidia 3000 or 4000 series GPU, preferably with lots of VRAM) . . . this is the shortest path to "looking like a photograph" . . . with that said, a skilled user who's willing to dig into tools and techniques can produce beautiful images from that SD 1.5 technology, now 2.5 yrs old. More on reddit.com

I've been mainly focusing on Flux for the last few months. It's great at realistic stuff, but struggles with styling and needs powerful hardware. Forge is probably the easiest option with good support for Flux but I think it might be falling behind on things like ControlNet. I still think ComfyUI is worth the effort to learn since it's the most powerful option and supports pretty much everything. More on reddit.com