# Stable Diffusion SDXL

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Stable Diffusion SDXL and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for LoRA-based stylizing and inpainting and fast local runs; critics say it is weak at composition and has been surpassed.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong results with LoRAs and inpainting (3 comments): "SDXL and FLUX models with LoRAs can and do vastly outperform at tons of things singular big models can't or won't do now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894530)) "SDXL is crap at composition. It's really good with LoRAs to stylize/inpaint though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178832)) "post-training on SDXL and Flux have given me good results here in the past" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45997848))
- Still competitive on image quality (3 comments): "There's not much of a reason to use SD 1.5 over SDXL if image quality is paramount." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061798)) "Even SDXL looks better, and that's a literal dinosaur." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46053507)) "dreaded SDXL is still unmatched" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219406))

## What people warn about

- Outclassed by newer models (2 comments): "SDXL has been outclassed for a while" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175236)) "SDXL has long been surpassed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178341))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Nano Banana](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nano-banana-pro.md): 265 recommend
- [gpt-image-1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-image-1-5.md): 79 recommend
- [FLUX.2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/flux-2.md): 66 recommend
- [gpt-image-2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-image-2.md): 63 recommend
- [Qwen-Image](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-image-2-1.md): 47 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Stable Diffusion SDXL", https://hackerapproved.com/p/sdxl/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).