Online graphic design platform Freepik, has unveiled F Lite, a text-to-image generator that the company says was trained only on licensed content, making it safe for commercial use. The 10 billion-parameter F Lite — currently available in two openly-licensed versions — was developed in partnership with Fal.ai, a San Francisco-based AI startup that uses a proprietary inference engine and APIs to enable fast training, inference, and scaling of image, video, audio, and multimodal AI models. Freepik Head of AI Iván de Prado describes F Lite as “a significant milestone in open, responsible AI.”

Freepik has released F Lite in two configurations: F Lite Standard for general-purpose use, and F Lite Texture, which offers “enhanced aesthetic quality and richer textures,” making it better suited for detailed prompts” and “less effective with vectors and short prompts,” de Prado writes in a blog post.

Freepik, which is based in Málaga, Spain, says both models are openly licensed, with weights available on Hugging Face. The code is also open source, “allowing you to use F Lite in ComfyUI, integrate it into your Python workflows via diffusers or fine-tune and create custom LoRAs,” de Prado says.

A technical report delves into the architecture and training process on GitHub, where the weights and other materials are available.

“F Lite was trained on 80 million images — a small dataset compared to other AI image generators which trained on over one billion images,” reports PetaPixel.

“Freepik makes no claim that F Lite produces images superior to leading image generators like Midjourney V7, Black Forest Labs’ Flux family, or others,” writes TechCrunch. “The goal was to make a model openly available so that developers could tailor and improve it,” adding that running F Lite requires “a GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM.”

PetaPixel notes that “F Lite joins a small group of models trained on licensed datasets” like Adobe’s Firefly and others from Shutterstock, Getty Images, Bria AI and Moonvalley.

Tom’s Guide runs down the top 10 image generators of 2025, and aside from Freepik (no. 9), Adobe Firefly (no. 7) is the only one mentioned above that made the list. Number 1, ChatGPT, does not offer a free plan, whereas Freepik allows “20 images/day (restricted models)” with paid plans starting at $7 per month for up to 7,000 images.

The 15-year-old FreePik was “originally known for its library of images” but “has very quickly become a major force in the artificial intelligence space,” writes Tom’s, adding that some of its momentum “was driven by its acquisition of AI-upscaler Magnific earlier this year.”