Every AI Upscaler, Scored: Two Rivals Now Resell Topaz’s Models

The best AI upscaler depends on what you want back: Topaz Gigapixel for real photographs and print, Magnific for AI art that needs detail invented, Upscayl if you want it free and offline, Krea if you already generate there, Let’s Enhance for batch web work, Topaz Astra for video, and Aiarty if you refuse to rent software. Krea and Magnific both license Topaz’s models on their paid tiers, so the real question is often which subscription you buy Topaz through.

Updated August 2026. Every price below was read off the vendor’s own pricing or checkout page, most recently on August 5, 2026.

The seven at a glance

Scores are our judgment on documented capability, published pricing and user reports. They are not a lab benchmark. One name is missing from the table on purpose. SeedVR2 is what practitioners keep recommending to each other, and it has no price, no vendor and nobody writing about it, which is exactly why it turns up in no comparison page including, until now, this one. It gets its own section below.

The category quietly consolidated onto one company’s models

Read the pricing pages side by side and something odd surfaces. Krea’s paid tiers describe “paid image upscalers, including Topaz Standard, that support outputs up to 22K.” Magnific’s Premium+ tier and above list “Magnific & Topaz upscalers.” Topaz’s own pricing page carries a testimonial from Krea’s co-founder, Victor Perez.

So for two of the three most-recommended options, the honest answer to “which AI upscaler is best” is: the one you were already considering, wrapped in a different subscription. You are not choosing between separate image pipelines. You are choosing where to pay for one of them, and whether you want the platform bolted on beside it.

The exception is Upscayl, which is free, open source, runs on your own machine, and owes nothing to anyone.

How we scored this (and what we didn’t do)

We did not run these tools on a shared test image set. Any page claiming a definitive winner without publishing crops is asking you to take its word for it.

What we did do, on July 30, August 5 and August 6, 2026: opened eight pricing, checkout and product pages across six vendors and recorded exactly what they charge, including the promotional strike-throughs; read three Reddit threads in full, one of them the thread Google’s own AI Overview cites; captured two live SERPs and their entire AI Overview reference lists; read the SeedVR2 repository, limitations section included; and pulled volume and difficulty for fifteen keywords in this cluster. Vendor marketing claims below are labelled as vendor claims.

One price used to be older than the rest. Aiarty’s was read on July 30 and skipped in the August 5 sweep; we re-opened it on August 6 and it had not moved a cent. Every figure on this page now carries an August stamp.

What documents can’t settle is which model keeps skin looking like skin. That needs artifacts we haven’t captured yet.

Ratings are ours. No vendor saw a draft, and nobody on this page paid to be on it.

Best for real photographs: Topaz Gigapixel

Gigapixel is still the reference point, and the reason is model choice rather than raw power. It ships ten image models, Standard, Standard Max, High Fidelity, Low Res, Text & Shapes, Art & CG, Recover, Redefine, Face Recovery and Wonder, so a scanned document and a portrait don’t go through the same maths. The most common complaint about AI upscaling, that faces come out looking like an oil painting, is usually a wrong-model problem, and one r/photography commenter says so bluntly: “Gigapixel is the best upscaler. If you were getting painting like smudges you could’ve been using the wrong option.”

Pricing is where photographers have turned hostile, and a closer read of the page explains why the number people quote each other never matches. Topaz runs three billing toggles, not two, and the price on the card moves with them. The same Gigapixel Personal plan is $12 a month if you commit annually and pay up front, which is $149; $19 a month on an annual commitment billed monthly; and $29 a month if you want the freedom to leave. One app, one page, a 2.4x spread, and the number you see first is the highest one (verified Aug 5, 2026). The all-apps Studio bundle is $34 a month billed annually, $399 a year, or $69 month to month.

There’s a second figure worth finding before you buy. Topaz’s personal plans cover commercial work only for organisations under $1M in annual revenue; above that the page routes you to Studio Pro at $79 a month (verified Aug 5, 2026). That footnote, not the sticker, is what makes this an expensive tool for a small studio.

Skip it if you upscale a handful of images a year. Month-to-month is $29 for a job Upscayl does locally for nothing, and the cheap $12 tier is only cheap if you hand over $149 today.

Best free AI upscaler: Upscayl

For most people reading this, the free tier wins outright, and it isn’t close.

Upscayl is a free, open-source desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. It runs on your own hardware, so there’s no upload, no queue and no account, and it goes to 16x with a choice of models and a batch mode. In the r/photography thread about printing images eight feet wide, the top-voted reply was a single word and a link: Upscayl.

There is now a paid Upscayl Cloud on top: a free trial of 10 credits, then a Pro plan at $24.99 for 300 credits a month, with rollover and outputs to 256MP (verified Aug 5, 2026). The desktop app remains free.

Skip it if you need the detail invented rather than recovered. Upscayl sharpens what is there. It will not build windows into a blurry building the way Magnific does, and the same r/Aiarty post that overrates its sponsor’s tool is fair on this point: Upscayl “doesn’t have the advanced detail generation” of the paid options.

Best for AI art: Magnific

Magnific is the one that isn’t really an upscaler. Feed it a soft generated image and it invents plausible detail: pores, brickwork, fabric weave. That is a feature when you’re finishing AI art and a disqualification when you’re restoring a photograph of someone’s grandmother.

Its bigger 2026 news is corporate. Freepik has rebranded the whole company to Magnific; magnific.com carries a banner reading “Freepik is now Magnific” over a footer reading “Copyright 2010-2026 Freepik Company S.L.U.” The original upscaler now lives at magnific.ai/legacy, where existing subscribers are told their plan runs until it expires. Every listicle in this SERP still describes Magnific as a standalone upscaling startup.

The price we cannot give you honestly. Magnific geo-prices, and it served our session in Polish złoty: Premium at PLN 71 a month list, PLN 50.50 billed annually, excluding VAT (verified Aug 5, 2026). We haven’t verified the US figures, so we aren’t printing a converted number and calling it a price. Two things hold regardless: Premium includes only Magnific’s own upscalers while Premium+ and above add Topaz’s, and there’s a 30-day refund guarantee.

Skip it if you shoot with a camera. Invented detail is a lie in a photograph, and you’re also buying a full generative platform, stock library and video suite you may never open.

Best if you already generate there: Krea

Krea’s argument is adjacency: if the images are being made in Krea, upscaling them there saves an export. Its free tier gives 100 units a day and caps upscales at 2K. Paid tiers open “paid image upscalers, including Topaz Standard” and outputs to 22K: Basic $5.25 a month, Pro $21, Max $63, Business $160, all billed annually (verified Aug 5, 2026). Basic is the cheapest paid route to Topaz-grade upscaling we found anywhere.

The catch is the credit ledger. Upscaling competes with generation for the same compute units, and Krea’s own table puts the Enhancer at 4 images a day on Free and 625 on Basic. If upscaling is the job rather than the finishing step, that budget disappears fast.

Skip it if you have no interest in generating images. You’d be buying a generation platform to use one of its side doors.

Best for batch web work: Let’s Enhance

Let’s Enhance is the boring, useful one: a browser tool with an API, priced per image. One image is one credit. The free tier gives 10 credits, caps output at 8 megapixels and watermarks the results. Starter is $9 a month billed annually, or $12 monthly, for 100 credits; Pro is $24 annually or $32 monthly for 300; Max is $34 annually or $45 monthly for 500 (verified Aug 5, 2026). Unused credits roll over while you stay subscribed, and vanish if you cancel.

Push 300 product shots through a listing pipeline and one credit per image is a number you can put in a spreadsheet before you spend it. A shared credit pool that also funds video generation is not.

Skip it if the watermark on free output is your first impression of the quality. Test on Upscayl before you pay anyone, because that’s the real floor.

Best AI video upscaler: Topaz Astra

Video is where free options genuinely run out. Astra is Topaz’s cloud video product: 4K output, all render modes, two concurrent jobs. It listed at $39 a month with $19 showing on the promo, and it is metered, 400 credits a month, which Topaz describes as roughly 10 minutes of HD video, with extra credits at $0.10 each (verified Aug 5, 2026). The desktop Topaz Video renders locally without credits and is $25 a month billed annually, $39 on an annual commitment billed monthly, or $59 month-to-month (verified Aug 5, 2026).

Do the arithmetic first. Ten minutes of HD a month is a short-form quota, not a documentary one, and a 45-minute restoration would cost several times the sticker price in credits.

Then correct the thing Google is telling everyone. Search “best ai video upscaler” and the AI Overview reports that Topaz Video AI “requires a powerful dedicated GPU and a $299 one-time license.” The GPU half is right. The licence half is stale: on Topaz’s own page, $299 is the annual subscription for Topaz Video Personal, renewing at $25 a month, with $39 and $59 options beside it (verified Aug 5, 2026). Topaz stopped selling perpetual licences; the summary at the top of the results page has not noticed. Budget on that sentence and you get a surprise in twelve months.

Skip it if you have a capable GPU and one long project. Local rendering on Topaz Video costs more per month and nothing per minute, which flips the maths past a few hours of footage.

The one nobody sells you: SeedVR2

Every tool above has a company behind it. That is why every listicle on this SERP lists tools like them and nothing else: a comparison page gets built out of marketing pages, and somebody has to write those first. The model practitioners keep naming has nobody doing that job.

SeedVR2 is ByteDance’s one-step diffusion restoration model, released under Apache 2.0, with the SeedVR2 paper accepted to ICLR 2026 and a community ComfyUI port that dragged it out of the research world and into everyday image work (verified against the repository, Aug 5, 2026). In the r/StableDiffusion thread below it is the single most-repeated answer for AI-generated stills, and the reason it appears in no vendor comparison is that there is no subscription to compare.

The cost is hardware, not licensing. The repo asks for one H100-80G to handle 100 frames at 720x1280, and four of them for 1080p or 2K. Free software, rented silicon.

Its authors are also more candid than any pricing page here. The repository’s own Notice says the models “tend to overly generate details on inputs with very light degradations,” which is the polite version of what users call it below.

Skip it if “install flash-attn” reads as a warning rather than a step. This is a research repository with a community wrapper, there is no support desk, and the hardware bill can exceed a year of Gigapixel.

Best for refusing subscriptions: Aiarty Image Enhancer

Aiarty exists because Topaz went subscription-only, and that is a real market. A lifetime licence is $99 on the promo, $155 list, one payment, three machines, Windows and Mac sold separately; the annual subscription is $75 on the promo against $85 list, auto-renewing with seven days’ notice (verified Aug 6, 2026). Digiarty claims models trained on 6.78 million images and output up to 32K; those are Digiarty’s numbers, not an audited figure.

Two things stop us ranking it higher, and neither is about output quality. The first is the countdown that never ends. The purchase page advertised a “Holiday Special Offer: 36% Off” on July 30. It advertised the same offer, at the same prices, on August 6. The coupon code inside its own Buy Now links reads SUMMERPROMO. A holiday sale running through summer with a summer coupon is not a sale. Treat $99 as the price.

The second is in the next section.

Skip it if you want the safest recommendation rather than the cheapest one. The consensus around this tool is contaminated in ways described below, and a one-time licence for a desktop app is only a bargain if the models keep getting better.

What Reddit actually says, and who is faking it

Google’s AI Overview for “best ai upscaler” cites twelve sources. Three are pages on topazlabs.com, including Topaz’s own article titled “Best Image Upscalers in 2026: Tested & Compared.” Two are the same Reddit thread. That thread is where this gets interesting.

The cited thread is What’s the Best Image Upscaler You’ve Ever Used?, posted January 7, 2026. It sits in r/Aiarty, whose sidebar reads “The Official Community for Aiarty Tools.” Its author now shows as [deleted]. It ranks four tools and places Aiarty Image Enhancer second at 8.9 out of 10, one tenth of a point behind Topaz, and the Aiarty link in the post carries a tracking parameter. At capture it had 15 points and 19 comments (read Jul 30, 2026).

The room it sits in tells you as much as the post does. When we re-opened the thread on August 5, 2026, every one of the ten other submissions Reddit surfaced beside it came from a single account flaired “Aiarty Official | Mod”: showcase images, a version-release note, a free-licence giveaway.

Its own commenters aren’t buying it. “Btw idk how you came up with this rating,” writes one. “Topaz by far is the best you picked.” That same commenter names the tools practitioners actually reach for, SUPIR and SeedVR, neither of which appears in any listicle on this SERP. The pattern repeats: in the r/photography thread, an account surfaces ten months later with the same pitch, one-time purchase, keeps texture instead of smudging, no monster GPU required.

So the community consensus Google is quoting is a vendor’s own marketing channel, a deleted account and a tracking link. That is not a community agreeing. That is a company talking to itself, loudly enough to be overheard by a language model.

The useful thread is the older one: Best upscaling software? in r/photography, posted July 2024 by someone printing 30-inch images to eight feet wide for sidewalk window graphics. It has 74 comments and 32 points (counts read Jul 30, 2026). The advice there is dull and correct. Upscayl first. Gigapixel if you’re paying, with the right model selected. Lightroom’s upscaler exists but hides behind the denoise button. And the warning that matters: push a file far enough and “the resulting images are very soft,” so test at final print size before you commit.

The second useful thread, and the one that settles the argument this category keeps having, is What is the best image upscaler currently available? in r/StableDiffusion, posted 11 December 2025. It carries 307 points and 101 comments, and Reddit’s own banner on it now reads “This post is locked. You won’t be able to comment.” Its consensus is final; nobody can revise it (counts and lock confirmed Aug 5, 2026).

What that thread agrees on is not a winner but a split, along the line every listicle blurs. “Topaz is the best for all images, it preserves detail and can upscale massively with less gpu strain,” one commenter writes, then draws the border himself: “Ai generated images however seedvr2 is best.” He comes back to it later, more plainly: “Topaz is for the regular photographer. It works well with real image data, not ai generated stuff.” The dissent is loud — “Topaz is not even close to the best. There’s so many better options” — and it resolves to open-source tile workflows rather than to another subscription.

The thread also names the artifact everyone eventually meets. Push SeedVR2 past about 3x and “the model’s internal prior starts filling in missing detail with hallucinated micro-texture which is why you’re seeing ‘lizard skin’.” That description matches, nearly word for word, the limitation ByteDance published in its own repository — a rare case of users and vendor agreeing on a flaw.

One line there is worth more than any comparison table, and it is about restraint: “almost no one regularly ‘needs’ a 32k image. Unless you’re printing on billboards and buildings then 8k is perfectly adequate for almost every possible application.”

Read it with your guard up in one respect too. A reply recommending Topaz Video goes on to explain how to obtain it without paying. That is a price signal, not a review.

Are AI upscalers worth paying for at all?

For most people, no, and we would rather say that than sell you a subscription.

The free and near-free options here are genuinely good: Upscayl on the desktop, Krea’s 2K free tier, and the upscaler already sitting inside Lightroom or Photoshop if you pay Adobe for anything. You don’t even need to pay Adobe. Its Firefly Generative Upscale runs 2x or 4x in the browser on a free Adobe account, takes files up to 100MB, and Adobe’s own FAQ confirms free users get daily generations without naming the number (verified Aug 6, 2026). It ranks fifth on Google for this page’s target term and almost no comparison mentions that it costs nothing. The paid tools earn their money in three situations: large-format print, where Gigapixel’s model choice is worth real money; finishing generated art, where Magnific’s invented detail is the entire product; and video, where nothing free comes close.

Everything else is a monthly charge for something you’ll use four times a year.

FAQ

What is an AI upscaler?

An AI upscaler enlarges an image or video using a model trained on millions of examples, predicting the detail that a plain resize would leave as blur. Some recover detail faithfully for photographs. Others invent detail that never existed, which suits generated art and ruins documentary work.

Which AI upscaler is best in 2026?

It depends on the source file. Topaz Gigapixel for photographs and print because it lets you pick the model per image, Magnific for AI art that needs detail invented, Upscayl when free and offline matters, Krea if you already generate there, and Topaz Astra for video.

Is there a genuinely free AI upscaler?

Yes. Upscayl’s desktop app is free, open source and runs locally on Windows, macOS and Linux with no account or upload, going up to 16x. Krea’s free tier upscales to 2K. Let’s Enhance gives 10 free credits but caps output at 8 megapixels and watermarks it (verified Aug 5, 2026).

How much does AI upscaling software cost?

Topaz Gigapixel is $12 a month billed annually ($149 up front), $19 on an annual commitment billed monthly, or $29 month-to-month; every Topaz app together is $34 a month billed annually. Let’s Enhance starts at $9 a month billed annually, Krea at $5.25. Aiarty sells a one-time lifetime licence at $99 on promo. Upscayl’s desktop app is free (all verified Aug 5, 2026).

What is the best AI video upscaler?

Topaz Astra for cloud work at $19 a month on the promo shown, metered at 400 credits which Topaz says covers about 10 minutes of HD video. Desktop Topaz Video is $25 a month billed annually or $59 month-to-month, with unlimited local rendering, which is cheaper for long projects (verified Aug 5, 2026).

Is Topaz Video a one-time purchase?

No, and Google’s AI Overview currently says otherwise. On Topaz’s own pricing page, Topaz Video Personal is $25 a month billed annually — the $299 figure being repeated as a “one-time license” is that annual subscription price. Month-to-month is $59 (verified Aug 5, 2026).

Why do AI upscalers make faces look waxy?

Usually because the wrong model ran. Tools that generate detail rather than recover it will smooth skin into plastic, and photographers in the r/photography thread cited above describe an “oil painting smudge” effect. Picking a face-aware or high-fidelity model, and upscaling less aggressively, fixes most of it.

Changelog

• 2026-08-06 — Price-verification pass. Aiarty was the last figure on this page still carrying a July stamp; its purchase page was re-opened live and every number was unchanged — $155 struck to $99 for the one-time lifetime licence, $85 struck to $75 for the auto-renewing annual licence, three devices, Windows and Mac sold separately. The “Holiday Special Offer: 36% Off” banner and the SUMMERPROMO coupon in its Buy Now links were both still there, one week and one season later, which upgrades the rolling-promo observation from a single sighting to two dated ones. Every price on the page now carries an August stamp. Also added Adobe’s Firefly Generative Upscale to the free-tier section, verified free on a free Adobe account at 2x and 4x with a 100MB file ceiling — Adobe ranks fifth organically for this page’s target term and its zero-dollar status goes unmentioned almost everywhere. Schema dateModified moved to 2026-08-06. No score, verdict or other price changed.
• 2026-08-05 — QA and edit pass. Corrected the method statement, which had gone stale against its own page: the research spans July 30 and August 5, covers eight vendor pages across six vendors, three Reddit threads, two SERP captures and fifteen keywords, not the single-day, two-thread, eleven-keyword figures previously printed. Stamped Aiarty’s price in the comparison table as verified July 30 rather than August 5, since it is the one price not re-opened on the later date. Re-fetched both cited Reddit permalinks: the r/StableDiffusion thread still resolves and its lock is confirmed by Reddit’s own banner, with the score corrected from 310 to 307; the r/Aiarty thread still resolves with its author still deleted, and every other submission returned alongside it came from one account flaired “Aiarty Official | Mod”, now stated in the body. Schema dateModified moved to 2026-08-05. No price, score or verdict changed.
• 2026-08-05 — Verification pass. Topaz pricing re-read and corrected: the page runs a three-way billing toggle, so Gigapixel Personal is $12/mo billed annually ($149/yr), $19/mo on annual commitment billed monthly, or $29/mo month-to-month, and Topaz Video Personal is $25/$39/$59 on the same three. The July capture had recorded only the month-to-month column. Added the commercial-use limit (personal plans cover organisations under $1M annual revenue; Studio Pro $79/mo above that). Corrected a live error in Google’s AI Overview for “best ai video upscaler”, which describes Topaz Video’s $299 annual subscription as a “one-time license”. Added SeedVR2 (ByteDance, Apache 2.0, ICLR 2026) as the open-weights option no vendor listicle carries, verified against its repository. Added a second Reddit source, the locked 310-point r/StableDiffusion thread, whose consensus splits on source material rather than brand. Keyword anchors re-pulled via keyword_overview now that quota reset: “ai upscaler” confirmed at 27,100/SD 33/$2.14, “best ai upscaler” corrected up to SD 31 and $7.25 CPC, “ai upscalers” plural corrected to SD 54. No score changed.
• 2026-07-30 — Page created. Prices read live on every vendor’s own site: Topaz Gigapixel $29/mo, Topaz Photo $39/mo, Topaz Video $59/mo, Topaz Studio $34/mo annual ($399/yr) or $69/mo monthly, Astra Standard $39 list / $19 promo; Upscayl desktop free plus Cloud Pro $24.99 for 300 credits; Krea Free/Basic/Pro/Max/Business at $0/$5.25/$21/$63/$160 annual; Let’s Enhance free/$9/$24/$34 annual; Aiarty $99 lifetime promo ($155 list) and $75 annual promo ($85 list). Magnific recorded as geo-priced with no verified USD figure. Freepik’s rebrand to Magnific recorded. SERP state captured for “best ai upscaler”: the AI Overview fires with twelve references, three of them topazlabs.com pages including Topaz’s own “best upscalers” listicle, two of them a single thread on a vendor-owned subreddit; the organic top six holds Topaz at #1 and four vendor properties in total, with Curious Refuge the only independent ranking above the fold. Both Reddit threads read in full and quotes verified. Keyword targets set from scratch: primary “ai upscaler”, 27,100/mo, SD 33, $2.14 CPC.

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Independent, no paid placements. We verify every price on the vendor’s own site and stamp the date; we publish who should skip each tool; we flag astroturfed consensus by name; we keep this changelog public. See how we score AI tools and our independence charter. More categories on the AI tools index, every verified price on the pricing index, every verdict in reviews. Related: what Reddit actually recommends for AI image generators and Opus Clip alternatives.