Envato AI

Our verdict on Envato AI

Envato AI didn't work for us. We tested it live as our tool of the week in August 2025, asking for Instagram ads for this podcast, and Jordan's verdict was blunt: "none of them are good." The images looked decent at a glance, but every one misspelled its text.

That is one test, on one day, for one task. Envato may have improved since, and we haven't tested its video or other AI features. We still pay for Envato, just not for this.

What we did with Envato AI

In Episode 9, Jordan opened Envato AI and asked it to create an Instagram ad for Built This Week, promoting new episodes every Friday. He picked that task because marketing, mostly Instagram ads, is what we normally use Envato for. It was his first time trying the AI side.

• Enhance prompt: he clicked it without knowing exactly what it did. It rewrote the prompt into a podcast ad with two co-hosts.
• Output: a grid of images. "Oh, that's pretty good," was his first reaction, until he read them.
• The problem: the text was garbled in every image. The hosts also didn't look like us, which wasn't a surprise.
• Retry: he added "no text on screen," since the models clearly couldn't do text well.

No text on screen. Because it seems like they can't they can't do text very well.

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 9

Then he ran the same prompt through our own in-house image tool, which sends one prompt to four models at once: Ideogram, a Google model, FLUX and a ByteDance model. The Google model got the text right: "Friday episode release. Listen now."

How we use Envato now

We didn't keep Envato AI in our workflow, so these steps are about how we use Envato overall, and what we'd do if you test its AI anyway:

1. Use Envato Elements for real stock. We've subscribed to Elements for years for stock video, audio and graphics, and Jordan used Envato sites like ThemeForest for ten to fifteen years. Real stock photos, such as an office space, are still its strength.
2. Use dedicated models for AI images. We generate images with our own multi-model tool, and later with tools like Nano Banana.
3. If you test Envato AI, start with "no text." Add the copy in a design tool afterward.
4. Compare against another model with the same prompt. That is how we saw the problem was Envato's output, not our prompt.

Where Envato AI falls short

• Text in images. Every image we got had misspelled text.
• Quality overall. Sam: "It's not as great as I thought it'd be."
• A black box. Jordan guessed it runs your prompt against several models, possibly four or five with variants, then shows all the results. If that is right, you may do better going to the best model directly.
• No likeness. It didn't produce images that looked like us, though no tool in that test did.

So we'll we'll just use Envato for the kind of stock footage we've historically used it for, which continues to be less and less every day, to be honest.

— Sam Nadler, Episode 9

The bigger lesson

Jordan closed the segment by saying AI is hard and nobody had found a silver bullet that does one thing really well for everybody all the time. Before AI, Envato was our go-to for things like music for videos. Now we generate a lot of that ourselves, which is the same shift that put Envato into AI in the first place.

For how we generate images and video in-house, see our Ryz Labs Video Studio build and ChatGPT vs Nano Banana.

Episodes featuring Envato AI

• Episode 9: tool of the week, our live Instagram ad test, and the comparison with our in-house image tool.

FAQ

Is Envato AI good?

Not in our test. In August 2025 we asked it for Instagram ads for Built This Week; every image had misspelled text and Jordan said none of them were good. Sam agreed it was not as great as he expected.

Can Envato AI put text in images?

Not reliably in our test. All the text was spelled wrong, so Jordan's fix was to prompt for no text on screen. A Google model in our own in-house tool got the same text right.

Is Envato Elements still worth it with AI?

For stock content, yes. We have subscribed to Envato Elements for years and Jordan said it is still great for real stock photos, though Sam said we use it less every day.

How does Envato AI generate images?

Envato didn't tell us. Jordan's guess from the output was that it sends your prompt to several models, maybe four or five with variants, and returns all the results.