{"slug": "krea-2", "name": "Krea 2", "category": "ai-models", "category_name": "AI models", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 6, "warners": 1, "score": 2.562, "rising": 1.35, "first": "2026-06-24", "latest": "2026-10-24", "why": "some of the biggest open-weight bangers (Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and the kind of slept-on Boogu-Image 0.1)", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 2, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 2], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "some of the biggest open-weight bangers (Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and the kind of slept-on Boogu-Image 0.1)", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "krea.ai", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.krea.ai", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Krea 2", "Krea"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 803553873, "item_id": 50222117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50222117", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-10-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "some of the biggest open-weight bangers (Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and the kind of slept-on Boogu-Image 0.1)", "excerpt": "> Whenever I try to run Image generation locally, be it with Flux or Qwen, I seem to be getting results that are about 1-2 years behind what ChatGPT can produce today. At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't really compare local models to proprietary frontier models. For all we know, those models are heavily subsidized and have trillions more parameters than the smaller, modest ones you can run on a single GPU.", "context": "runs a prompt-adherence benchmark site", "use_case": "open-weight image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents"}, {"id": 801749664, "item_id": 50109354, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109354", "by": "ThrowawayTestr", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love krea 2, thank you for all your hard work!", "excerpt": "I love krea 2, thank you for all your hard work!", "context": "", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale"}, {"id": 801694208, "item_id": 50105888, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105888", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The 12B open-weight Krea 2 scored pretty well in my GenAI benchmark", "excerpt": "Nice release! The 12B open-weight Krea 2 scored pretty well in my GenAI benchmark [1] on txt2img (6 out of 15) when I tested it back in June, so I\u2019m looking forward to putting Krea 3 through its paces. While Krea 2 was principally a text-to-image model, it seems like Krea 3 might be flipping that around? When I tried the beta a few minutes ago, I noticed a warning message saying that text-to-image was experimental at", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale"}, {"id": 796428545, "item_id": 49776784, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776784", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-09-20", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive", "excerpt": "Boogu-Image has the Apache 2.0 License [1] (good coherence, but outputs can look synthetic). And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive - I think commercial usage is allowed under $1 million. Boogu-Image scored 6/15 and Krea 2 scored 7/15 on my GenAI Showdown benchmark [3] - only Ideogram4 eclipses them in terms of local models, but its got a far more restrictive license and the JSON structured ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen Image 2.1"}, {"id": 779835360, "item_id": 48739710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739710", "by": "satvikpendem", "date": "2026-06-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Krea is good.", "excerpt": "Krea is good. Check out r/StableDiffusion for more information on the open SOTA.", "context": "", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Nano Banana 2 Lite"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 778727648, "item_id": 48670478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670478", "by": "commoner", "date": "2026-06-25", "version": "2", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's not open source when the license", "excerpt": "While I appreciate that Krea made this model's weights available for download, it's not open source when the license (https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw/blob/main/LICENSE.pdf) has these terms: > 2.3 Revenue Threshold for Commercial Use. Commercial Use under this Agreement of the Krea Model, Derivatives, or Outputs is permitted only if you (including all affiliated entities under common ownership or control) have ", "context": "", "use_case": "Image generation model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}]}], "who": [{"by": "vunderba", "context": "runs a prompt-adherence benchmark site", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50222117", "date": "2026-10-24"}, {"by": "CuriouslyC", "context": "runs Krea 2 locally", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107203", "date": "2026-10-15"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["image generation", "open-weight image generation", "local image generation", "image generation model"], "compared": [{"slug": "ideogram-4", "name": "Ideogram 4", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "qwen-image", "name": "Qwen-Image", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "flux", "name": "FLUX", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "qwen", "name": "Qwen", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 778635792, "item_id": 48664737, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664737", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's literally cheaper on Krea than using ChatGPT Images", "excerpt": "\"it's hard to justify burning a LoRA for most uses\" -> Not really, it's literally cheaper on Krea than using ChatGPT Images; NBP and GPT-Images 2.0 are quite expensive, you'd be surprised. LoRAs are one of our most stickiest features (this doesn't mean they are intuitive; this just means that customers who use it, suddenly are retained way more because of how much better their images become). But yeah, anything out t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778597104, "item_id": 48662319, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662319", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "people are going crazy over it!", "excerpt": "Thanks! You should definitely check out the r/stablediffusion sub-reddit; people are going crazy over it! We also had 0-day support from people like Ostris and ComfyUI from the open source community", "context": "", "use_case": "open weights image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778591312, "item_id": 48661957, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661957", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We are on par with Nano Banana in terms of image quality", "excerpt": "Hello HN, I am Diego Rodriguez, Co-founder & CTO at Krea. We are releasing the weights and a _juicy_ technical report---at least given current industry standards. In it we describe data curation/captioning, model architecture, post-training, RL pipelines, prompt expansion, style references, and our infrastructure in great detail. When it comes to theweights themselves, there's actually 2 releases: * Krea 2 Turbo. Thi", "context": "Co-founder & CTO at Krea", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778579872, "item_id": 48661242, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661242", "by": "mattnewton", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We recommend training off the undistilled, Raw checkpoint, and then applying the LoRA to the Turbo model for inference.", "excerpt": "You can find some links and details in the GitHub readme for finetuning / LoRA support. Ostiris, musubi tuner, fal and hugging face diffusers are all day-0 supported :) https://github.com/krea-ai/krea-2 We recommend training off the undistilled, Raw checkpoint, and then applying the LoRA to the Turbo model for inference.", "context": "", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 767646880, "item_id": 47977930, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977930", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm the cofounder of Krea (https://www.krea.ai/). We build creative tools", "excerpt": "Krea; Fulltime; Onsite, San Francisco, CA, USA. I'm the cofounder of Krea (https://www.krea.ai/). We build creative tools and large-scale infrastructure for multimedia teams. Users range from hobbyists to world-renowned creatives: architects behind the World Trade Center or creative teams at Apple. We treat research, engineering, and creativity as first-class citizens; we want engineers for our research, product, and", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"}, {"id": 761701280, "item_id": 47606330, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606330", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-04-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a company building creative tooling and large-scale infrastructure for multimedia teams", "excerpt": "Krea; Fulltime; Onsite, San Francisco, CA, USA. I'm the cofounder of Krea (https://www.krea.ai/), a company building creative tooling and large-scale infrastructure for multimedia teams. Users range from hobbyists to world-renowned creatives: architects behind the World Trade Center or creative teams at Apple. We treat research, engineering, and creativity as first-class citizens. We're looking for engineers to join ", "context": "cofounder of Krea", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48646659", "title": "Krea 2 Technical Report", "mentions": 8}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105648", "title": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775499", "title": "Qwen Image 2.1", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171379", "title": "A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123580", "title": "FLUX 3 Image Klein", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735444", "title": "Nano Banana 2 Lite", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 2, "warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 2, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 803553873, "item_id": 50222117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50222117", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-10-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "some of the biggest open-weight bangers (Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and the kind of slept-on Boogu-Image 0.1)", "excerpt": "> Whenever I try to run Image generation locally, be it with Flux or Qwen, I seem to be getting results that are about 1-2 years behind what ChatGPT can produce today. At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't really compare local models to proprietary frontier models. For all we know, those models are heavily subsidized and have trillions more parameters than the smaller, modest ones you can run on a single GPU.", "context": "runs a prompt-adherence benchmark site", "use_case": "open-weight image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents"}, {"id": 802034947, "item_id": 50127184, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127184", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-10-17", "version": "2", "stance": "compare", "quote": "comparable to Krea 2 and Ideogram 4", "excerpt": "Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of them have been moving to their own bespoke, non-commercial licenses (Ideogram, Krea, Flux, Qwen 2, etc). Annoyingly, the original Qwen-Image was actually Apache 2 before they switched over unfortunately. In addition to Moss, Boogu Image 0.1 is a unified model which came out in June and is kind of being slept on right now, is actually pretty decent and falls under the Apache 2.0 license. ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "FLUX 3 Image Klein"}, {"id": 801749664, "item_id": 50109354, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109354", "by": "ThrowawayTestr", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love krea 2, thank you for all your hard work!", "excerpt": "I love krea 2, thank you for all your hard work!", "context": "", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale"}, {"id": 801715248, "item_id": 50107203, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107203", "by": "CuriouslyC", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": "2", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "As a Krea2 local model enjoyer", "excerpt": "As a Krea2 local model enjoyer, your challenge is that on the $20 GPT plan you get a fairly good amount of Codex use and image gen. If I used Krea, it would be because I fine tuned/built a workflow on top of it to do something GPT image couldn't/wouldn't do. Maybe there's a market for the cheapest \"good enough\" bulk image gen model (spam? idk what the applications would be), but personally I'd say you should focus on", "context": "runs Krea 2 locally", "use_case": "local image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale"}, {"id": 801694208, "item_id": 50105888, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105888", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The 12B open-weight Krea 2 scored pretty well in my GenAI benchmark", "excerpt": "Nice release! The 12B open-weight Krea 2 scored pretty well in my GenAI benchmark [1] on txt2img (6 out of 15) when I tested it back in June, so I\u2019m looking forward to putting Krea 3 through its paces. While Krea 2 was principally a text-to-image model, it seems like Krea 3 might be flipping that around? When I tried the beta a few minutes ago, I noticed a warning message saying that text-to-image was experimental at", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 3 \u2013 An image model built for editing at scale"}, {"id": 796431634, "item_id": 49776977, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776977", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-09-20", "version": "2", "stance": "compare", "quote": "they've been upstaged by Krea 2 (6/15) and Ideogram4 (8/15)", "excerpt": "So thoughts Positives \u2022 It's a heck of a lot smaller than Qwen-Image 1 (20b parameters) at only 7b, making it one of the smaller open-weight models available (Z-Image Turbo is one of the few that is smaller at 6b) when compared to Ideogram, Krea2, Flux2, etc. \u2022 It supports native transparency (Qwen's team, as far as I know, is the only one attempting to tackle this). Even though it's relatively trivial to set up back", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen Image 2.1"}, {"id": 796428545, "item_id": 49776784, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776784", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-09-20", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive", "excerpt": "Boogu-Image has the Apache 2.0 License [1] (good coherence, but outputs can look synthetic). And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive - I think commercial usage is allowed under $1 million. Boogu-Image scored 6/15 and Krea 2 scored 7/15 on my GenAI Showdown benchmark [3] - only Ideogram4 eclipses them in terms of local models, but its got a far more restrictive license and the JSON structured ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen Image 2.1"}, {"id": 779835360, "item_id": 48739710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739710", "by": "satvikpendem", "date": "2026-06-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Krea is good.", "excerpt": "Krea is good. Check out r/StableDiffusion for more information on the open SOTA.", "context": "", "use_case": "image generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Nano Banana 2 Lite"}, {"id": 778854513, "item_id": 48678407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678407", "by": "Eisenstein", "date": "2026-06-25", "version": "2", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "now supports Krea2", "excerpt": "Rolling build of Koboldcpp now supports Krea2: * https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases/tag/rolling Model weights: * https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp/blob/master/docs/krea2.md In the launcher GUI, select 'Image Gen' and set Krea2 Turbo gguf as the image model, Qwen3 VL 4b gguf as the T5 model, and Wan2.1 safetensors as the VAE.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778727648, "item_id": 48670478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670478", "by": "commoner", "date": "2026-06-25", "version": "2", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's not open source when the license", "excerpt": "While I appreciate that Krea made this model's weights available for download, it's not open source when the license (https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw/blob/main/LICENSE.pdf) has these terms: > 2.3 Revenue Threshold for Commercial Use. Commercial Use under this Agreement of the Krea Model, Derivatives, or Outputs is permitted only if you (including all affiliated entities under common ownership or control) have ", "context": "", "use_case": "Image generation model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778656992, "item_id": 48666062, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666062", "by": "vunderba", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": "2", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is a really impressive showing especially given how fast the Turbo model at 8 steps.", "excerpt": "Results are in! This is a really impressive showing especially given how fast the Turbo model at 8 steps. The only locally hostable model that managed to outperform it was Ideogram 4 which is significantly slower (think minutes vs seconds). It did fall to the usual \u201cmodel killers\u201d: the nine-pointed star, Count Rugen, the overcrowded flat Earth. But overall, it really punched above its weight class, scoring the highes", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}, {"id": 778622960, "item_id": 48663935, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663935", "by": "dvrp", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you can try it right away at krea.ai/image", "excerpt": "here u go: https://ibb.co/XfZSJKyz you can try it right away at krea.ai/image (warning: you need to sign-up)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Krea 2 Technical Report"}]}