Ideogram 4.0 is the company's first open-source-weights model, released on June 3: 9.3B parameters, 34 layers of single-stream Diffusion Transformer, trained from scratch, native 2K output (up to 2048 pixels, with up to 6:1 aspect ratio), with fp8 and nf4 quantization versions released simultaneously, and the nf4 version deployable on a single 24GB GPU. At inference, three sampling presets — V4_QUALITY_48 (45 steps + 3 refinement), V4_DEFAULT_20, and V4_TURBO_12 — are available, with flexible quality/speed trade-offs.
The biggest differentiation is "JSON-structured prompts + strong typography control." The training corpus uses JSON for all descriptions; each element can carry a color palette (16 hex colors per image, 5 colors per element), a bounding box (y_min, x_min, y_max, x_max, normalized to 0-1000), and a literal text field, allowing simultaneous control of multi-line, multi-font in-image text. This is key to its large lead over comparable open-source models (20B Qwen-Image, 32B FLUX.2 dev, 80B HunyuanImage 3.0 MoE) on the X-Omni-OCR text-rendering leaderboard.
In ContraLabs' blind test, 10 professional designers did pairwise comparisons of four models. Ideogram 4.0 took first place with a 47.9% preference rate, well above Nano Banana 2 (30.0%), FLUX.2 max (15.5%), and Grok Imagine 1.0 (15.0%); the 5-point score for "willingness to use in real client work" reached 3.55, leading Nano Banana 2 by nearly 0.7 points.
Architecturally, the single-stream DiT is already the consensus of Z-Image, Black Forest Labs, and others, but Ideogram's choice of Qwen3-VL 8B as the text encoder is unusual — extracting 13 layers of intermediate hidden states and stitching them with image tokens, then feeding them into the same 34-layer Transformer, simultaneously patches up short boards in prompt-alignment (Prism), spatial reasoning (SpatialGenEval), and layout control (7Bench). Weights are limited to non-commercial use, and commercial deployment requires going through the official API, with deployment also requiring integration with Hive for content moderation.