We've spent time with all of them. Looka, Brandmark, Adobe Firefly's generative features, Midjourney pushed into logo territory, Canva's AI logo maker, and a handful of newer entrants promising to replace the branding agency with a ten-minute questionnaire. We tested them on real briefs — some for internal projects, some as part of early exploration for client work.
This is our honest assessment. Not a marketing piece for any of them, not a takedown, just what we actually found when we put them through their paces.
What AI Logo Tools Exist
The current landscape splits roughly into two categories: dedicated AI logo platforms and general AI image tools used for logo-adjacent work.
Dedicated platforms include Looka, Brandmark, Tailor Brands, and Hatchful. These are built specifically for logo generation — you answer questions about your business, style preferences, and colour palette, and the system generates a set of logo options. They typically output full brand kits with colour codes, font files, and social media assets. Pricing usually sits between $20 and $80 for a one-time download.
General AI tools used for logo work include Midjourney (for visual exploration), Adobe Firefly (for vector-adjacent generation), and increasingly, GPT-4o's image generation. These weren't designed as logo tools but can produce distinctive graphic marks that serve as starting points.
Brandmark sits somewhere in between — it uses machine learning trained specifically on logo design rather than general image generation, which gives it a different character from Midjourney-style outputs.
What They Get Right
The dedicated platforms are better than their reputation suggests for a narrow set of use cases. Here's what genuinely works:
Speed of exploration
Looka can generate thirty logo directions in the time it takes to make a coffee. For a solo founder exploring whether they want a wordmark, a lettermark, or an icon-based logo, that breadth of rapid exploration is genuinely useful. You can surface a preference you didn't know you had within minutes.
Accessibility for bootstrappers
For a business that genuinely cannot afford professional brand design — a local sole trader, a weekend side project, an internal tool — an AI logo is vastly better than nothing, or better than a founder attempting something in Canva with zero design experience. The outputs are clean, they use real font systems, and they're delivered with appropriate file formats.
Starting point quality
Brandmark in particular produces marks that feel more considered than its price point suggests. We've seen outputs from it that a junior designer would have been proud of. The colour and typography pairings are often solid. If you treat the output as a starting sketch rather than a finished product, there's real value here.
The best thing you can do with an AI logo output is treat it like a rough sketch — useful for proving a direction, not suitable for presenting as a finished brand.
What They Get Wrong
The limitations are significant, and they compound in ways that aren't always obvious at first.
Strategic blindness
AI logo tools don't know your market. They don't know who your competitors are, what visual codes already dominate your category, or what makes your positioning distinct. They generate based on style preferences and industry tags — "technology", "hospitality", "wellness" — but these tags produce category averages, not differentiated identities.
The result is logos that look competent but blend in. They use the same visual vocabulary as every other business in the same category, because the AI has trained on that category and learned to produce what's typical rather than what's distinctive. Differentiation is a strategic outcome, and strategy requires understanding context that no AI logo tool has access to.
Uniqueness is not guaranteed
AI logo tools generate from pattern libraries, which means outputs can share strong visual similarities with other businesses. Looka in particular has been subject to complaints about multiple businesses receiving near-identical logos. This isn't a bug — it's a consequence of generating from a shared pool of design elements. If your logo looks like three other companies in your space, it's not doing its job.
Scalability and technical quality
The outputs from dedicated AI logo platforms are often not production-ready in the ways that matter for serious brand use. Vector paths can be irregular. Icon marks may not hold up at favicon scale. Typography customisation is limited. If you need to hand this logo to a signage company, an embroidery machine, or a motion designer, you'll likely need a designer to rebuild it from scratch anyway.
The Midjourney problem
Using Midjourney or similar image generators for logos compounds these problems. Midjourney doesn't understand that a logo needs to be a vector, that it needs to work in one colour, that it needs to scale to 16px. It produces stunning graphic marks that are often technically unusable without significant manual reconstruction. They can be extraordinary inspiration — but the gap between "Midjourney output" and "usable logo" is a designer's full working day at minimum.
The Real Value of a Logo
The most common misconception we encounter — even from sophisticated clients — is that a logo is primarily a visual artefact. A shape, a typeface, a colour. That's what AI tools address, and it's real, but it's the smallest part of what a logo does.
A logo isn't a picture. It's a vessel for the meaning your brand accumulates over time.
The Nike swoosh is not a great logo because it's well drawn, although it is. It's a great logo because decades of investment in athletic excellence, in emotional advertising, in the stories of athletes, have filled that simple mark with enormous meaning. The shape is a container. The brand fills it.
This means the first question in logo design isn't "what should the logo look like?" It's "what do we want this company to mean to the people it serves?" That question requires competitive research, customer understanding, positioning work, and strategic clarity. It requires conversations that an AI questionnaire cannot substitute for.
When a brand designer creates a logo, they're not just drawing a shape — they're translating a strategy into a visual language. Every decision (the weight of a letterform, whether to use a geometric or humanist typeface, the tension between an icon and wordmark) is a strategic decision about how the brand wants to position itself and how it wants to be perceived.
AI tools optimise for aesthetics. Good logo design optimises for meaning.
When AI Logos Make Sense
There are scenarios where we'd genuinely recommend AI logo tools over spending on professional brand design:
- Early-stage startups that need a placeholder identity while validating a product — get an AI logo, use it for six months, invest in real branding once you've found product-market fit
- Internal tools and company-facing products that don't need to compete for customer attention
- Personal projects, portfolios, and side hustles where budget is genuinely constrained
- Non-commercial projects — community groups, hobby ventures, passion projects
- As a rapid exploration tool at the beginning of a professional branding engagement, to quickly surface directional preferences before a designer begins work
What AI logos are not well-suited for: any business where brand perception directly affects purchase decisions, any market where visual differentiation matters, any company intending to grow into a recognisable brand.
Our Take
AI logo tools have a legitimate place in the ecosystem. They democratise access to functional visual identities for people and projects that couldn't otherwise afford them. For that use case, they represent a genuine improvement on the landscape of five years ago.
What they don't do — and can't do with current technology — is replace brand strategy. The questions that matter most in identity design are not visual questions. They're questions about positioning, differentiation, audience perception, and competitive context. Until AI tools can conduct real market research, interview stakeholders, analyse competitors, and make strategic judgement calls, they will continue to produce work that looks like branding rather than work that functions as branding.
The most honest framing is this: an AI logo gives you a mark. A brand designer gives you an identity. The difference between those two things is the difference between a tool that fills a visual space and a tool that builds a business.
For more on brand identity and how it connects to your digital presence, read our piece on making brand identity and website design work together. And if you're using AI in your creative process, our guide to using Midjourney in client work covers how to deploy it responsibly.