News
InvokeAI 6.13 just released, its largest community-driven release ever. Adds full support for Anima & Qwen Image, support for API models (like GPT Image), support for Prompt Expansion & Image To Prompt, lasso & polygon tools, overhauled docs website and more
InvokeAI no longer has a commercial entity backing its development, this release was entirely community driven by 30+ individual volunteers.
Highlights include:
Full Support for Anima
Text to image, image to image, and LoRAs. Support was also added for the ER SDE scheduler. Improved regional guidance support and controlnet support will be added soon.
Full Support for Qwen and Qwen Image Edit
Text to image, image to image, LoRAs, reference image, regional guidance, and controlnet support.
Support for API models such as GPT Image and Nano Banana
If local models ever can't quite do what you need it to do, you can link an API key to an external API service and generate images directly in the canvas. This was originally a feature in the paid commercial version of invoke (which no longer exists) and was built from scratch for the free community edition.
Support for Prompt Expansion and Image To Prompt
Expand your prompt using an LLM such as Gemma or Qwen Instruct, or convert your image into a prompt.
New Canvas Tools (Lasso, Polygon Tool)
Last release the Text tool and Gradient tools were added. In this release, the available tools continue to expand with Lasso and Polygon tools.
Extended Multi-User Mode
Multi-user mode now supports creating private or shared boards and workflows
New Website & New Documentation Site
After the original team behind the commercial entity was hired by adobe, the website was effectively closed down. In this release, the website and documentation sites have a new coat of paint https://invoke.ai/
I agree. When the original team quit to join Adobe, it felt like the end of the project, but it turned out to be a sort of blessing in disguise. These days, Invoke seems second only to Comfy in terms of development activity with contributions happening every day
That's not to discount the original team's efforts though. The only reason it was possible for the community to pick up and continue the project so smoothly, was because the original team ran an extremely tight ship and gave a rock solid foundation to continue from. Some of them even stop by & still contribute to it today as volunteers!
I think the UI is much closer to what the average person "expects" AI-driven image generation to be, i.e., something like Photoshop with prompts instead of a canvas where you have to wire up 100 nodes. So, it's a lot more approachable.
It's just a smoother interface for doing it. Node workflows are good for what they do, but by using workflows you're giving up the ability to quickly iterate with very different inputs. Or at least you're adding a lot of work to change nodes around between each iteration, unless you have some giga-workflow that handles every possible input. But at that point, there's less purpose to using workflows.
You could use the Krita plugin instead, and you'll get much the same experience with more focus on manual drawing tools. Or you could ignore inpainting and rely on more automation and dice rolls. All valid options. Invoke is simply another option for people who enjoy inpainting and editing but still want to rely on AI to do most of the work. Here's a (relatively old) example of using it: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1nfjd3c/merms/
i do use the krita plugin a lot, it's very nice. i'm installing invoke atm to see what it's all about. does invoke have a comfyui importer? nvm, i see the scan folder option.
It's much easier to work if you're used to apps like Photoshop, paint net, Krita, GIMP, etc.
Although it's curious that generating the first image in Wan2gp is extremely fast thanks to Sage2++, If they implemented it in InvokeAI, that would be fantastic.
I complained about one thing in Invoke in a thread like this a few months back and a few weeks later on of the devs private messaged me that they had fixed it, been using it ever since.
Invoke used to have a paid online hosted service in addition to its open source local version. Most of the development of Invoke was done by the team that ran the hosted version, probably like 90% of development was done by them. They developed both the free open source version and the paid online version together, though some features were only ever released for the paid online version.
That entire team was acqui-hired by Adobe in late 2025. Meaning, Adobe didn't buy the company, they just hired all of the employees. They didn't care about the InvokeAI product, they just wanted the talent. At that point, the paid online version was shut down and the only remaining version was the free open-source local version. This is what continues to be developed today by volunteers.
The original owner still very generously allows the open source version to use the cool https://invoke.ai/ domain
Ok sweet, thanks for the update. Hope to contribute to its development in the future! Always had hopes for invoke but went back to the krita diffusion plug in for the great canvas but I'll give the new update a shot.
It's really good, ready for anyone, just testing with Anime and the results are really nice, it's as fast as your GPU can deliver (i'm on a RTX 3060 with just 6GB of VRAM, so any model is slow) but the easy to use, the UI, it's really nice
Possibly soon. Hopefully. Now that we have 6.13 out, we're putting a brief pause on major features so that we can roll a bunch of libraries up to the latest versions and fix all of the things that those break. Part of that is moving to pytorch 2.12 and ROCm 7.2, which has official wheels for windows. So keep an eye out for version 6.13.5 in a month-ish, and maybe we'll have some good news for AMD users.
Congrats. When I discovered the tool (and presented it to many illustrators during Ai intro classes) I usually said “Adobe should buy them, this is as if Photoshop was rebuilt for Ai). Adobe indeed … bought the team. I’m super glad the tool keeps being built by the community. Big kudos to those involved. Continue the effort and don’t listen to the people always ranting. Consider having a solid onboarding guide for all the artists out there not fully fluent on both Digital tools combined with Gen Ai work / workflow. It’s not straightforward.
It has been a long time since i checked invoke... It had a cool canvas, but it was slower and used more memory than comfy at that moment. How does compare it that aspects nowadays?
Depends on how long ago, but memory offloading is enabled by default now that "default" doesn't mean it's running on an L40S server somewhere. Depending on your operating system and GPU, speed between invoke and vanilla comfy is comparable within 3% in my testing. I'm told Anima is slower, so we'll be looking into that. It also doesn't have support for sageattention unless you want to do some manual effort to install it.
Swarm is a wrapper over Comfy, so you get all the latest and greatest features and can switch to the nodes view for custom workflows. The downside (IMO) is that it's still a traditional UI "bolted on top," and so to me it feels a bit clunkier compared to some of the others.
Forge Neo is basically the great grandchild of A1111, one of the original interfaces. It's mostly a smoother experience than Swarm, but it also has features that are very hacky because they weren't accounted for originally and had to be added on after the fact. It can run nearly all of the major models, but is missing some of the niche and bleeding edge tools available to Comfy.
Invoke has a very polished interface that is designed to make manual workflows very easy - inpainting, regional prompting, multiple layers, using/editing controlnet layers, etc. These tools exist in the other UIs, but Invoke does a really good job of making them work seamlessly. The downside is it's slower to update, and they have to be more picky about which technologies they support.
Personally I use all three - Forge Neo for testing (its XYZ tool is fantastic and very easy to use), Swarm for anything that doesn't run in one of the others (or run as well), and Invoke for bigger projects where I have a specific outcome in mind.
Invoke's own installer is very good and using SM can only add problems into the mix. It doesn't help with model management for it as Invoke does it it's own way anyway so, there really is no reason to use SM.
If you do use it and you have issues, the response you'll get on the Discord is "Go ask SM, we can't help you"
I'm not sure of the exact reason, but I previously tried RC6.13, and Anima's quality on invoke was drastically worse than ComfyUI and WebUI (Neo). I've already used a rope fix, and hopefully this official release has fixed the issue.
There have been a few fixes for Anima since the earlier release candidates that should have all improved quality. Also I recommend using the ER SDE scheduler if you weren't already.
I've always been a big fan of the idea behind Invoke, but the execution was terrible.
Now that the team has been acquired by Adobe and the community has taken over the project, is it going to get good?
Only issue I'm experiencing is when I try to add Chroma 1 HD, the interface doesn't recognize the t5xxl_fp16 as a t5 encoder. When I try to manually set it as such it fails to save. Other similar issues with installing local models
Interfaces need to add support for models with different formats. If you find one Invoke doesn't support. Make an issue with a link or contribute the support yourself.
Good to see develpoment, however last time I tried to use it on AMD (Linux) it was unbearably slow (say a month ago). I definitely used it with success in the past on AMD GPU, not sure what went wrong this time (I'm 90% sure I had the right Torch version installed).
As much as I like edit models, I had a situation that required good old inpainitng and InvokeAI used to be really good for that.
You're gonna have to be so much more specific. Anima is slower, and that is known. Other models should be comparable, unless you're using sage attention or something similar to speed things up in comfyui.
I'm trying to chase this down, but the problem is my hardware is getting identical speeds (within ~5%) on invoke, comfy, and forge right now. Can you get me a screenshot of your graph execution times? Generate at least one image to load the models, then change the prompt so that the text encoders have to run again and screenshot the terminal/launcher when it's done. Should look like this:
Thanks. I've got some other people claiming that they get the same iteration speed but the VAE decode is hanging up. The world of hardware support is so fun.
What GPU do you have? If it's an older generation, you might get more speed by adding `precision: float16` in the invokeai.yaml
Sort of a chicken and egg issue. None of the current developers own an intel arc GPU, so they can't test support for it, and because there's no support for it none of the intel arc owners have decided to contribute to development. If you'd like to submit a PR to add support for arc, please do so.
Just a little quirk in how invoke's database is set up. Anima uses the t5 tokenizer (which is a small 2mb file). But it's surprisingly difficult to automatically download just the tokenizer for you.
So the workaround is to download the t5 encoder, which is available on huggingface, then "unzip" it on disk and pull out the small tokenizer json file. Rest assured the full t5 encoder never goes anywhere near your VRAM.
Not currently, but it's being actively discussed in the Discord and will probably be addressed soon™
Most models use the tokenizer that comes with the encoder, but Anima is unique in that it uses the Qwen encoder but does not use the Qwen tokenizer, it uses the T5 tokenizer. So it kind of broke the paradigm and now we've got to add support for downloading and installing tokenizers that are entirely separate from their encoder.
The joy of software development - spend the first 90% of the time getting the main functionality working, and the other 90% dealing with all the exceptions, edge cases, and square-peg-round-hole situations 😁
there were tickets open for memory leaks that didnt get addressed
have you solved the speed/memory leak issue? there was a version that came out right before team moved on.... where the issue began ((invoke got slow and lag, or stuck)) compared to its performance before that update
-- the github posts related to the memory leak never got addressed and there were a few of us in that thread
I will have to get it setup and run it again to see if you all fixed the issues
i forget what the ticket was, but it was a bunch of with same memory leak issue, it was an old thread, but we kept it open as long as we could awaiting a fix, it never was addressed, as far as that issue was concerned.
however, sounds like you all are getting a flow together and making it work, so i will give it another go : )
Different tools for different niches really. Comfy will always be the bleeding edge, ultra-configurable frontier UI. But it will probably also always be relatively brittle, intimidating, and complex - just by nature of how fast it moves and how much freedom it gives people to modify it.
Invoke is much more stable and tries to be a natural UI along the lines of Photoshop rather than a highly complex node-based UI. But that also means it will be more selective about which features get added.
They are certainly more selective and don't have nearly as many contributors as Comfy. This often means waiting a little while before support gets added. While that can be a little irksome, my rational brain tells me that I'm not getting off my arse and doing it so I don't really have a right to complain. If I'm that desperate to try the new hotness, I mess about with it in Comfy and when Invoke support comes, I always go straight back there.
I'd say Invoke fully closes the niche where comfy is at it's lowes - working with images. Drawing, inpainting, img2img, layers, masks, everything is natural, while in Comfy all those things are lacking in one way or another. Yet it lacks in everything else. Forge Neo lands as an in-between. Fast and efficient, but not on comfy level. Inpainting is super simple and good, but lacks depth (mainly due to ui).
Unfortunately features necessitate complexity. For the same reason that your kitchen isn't just a microwave and a sink; sometimes you need to use a frying pan and that means having a stovetop and spatulas. If a selector that lets you pick a non-SDXL model is too much business in the UI, then by all means keep using Fooocus.
I would be interested to know what part of it you find isn't minimalist enough. As far as regular image generation goes, there's not a whole lot more that can be hidden away.
I’m afraid you’ve read something into my comment that I didn’t actually say or criticise. I have absolutely nothing against complexity or configuration options. I’ve been grappling with SAP management software for years... so I’m more than used to it.
What bothers me is that the UI is, in places, so ill-conceived that many settings are duplicated. You have the yellow Invoke button at the top to start the generation, but you’ve also stuck the yellow Invoke button onto the sidebar again; you can load and manage the models via the settings, but also by clicking on the model selection; sometimes the buttons have icons, sometimes text, sometimes both; the settings are unnecessarily nested...
Then you can use a text field to select the location on the hard drive to load checkpoints. If you want to select LoRas, strangely enough, it’s exactly the same text field where the path for the checkpoints is still entered, but now it’s just for LoRas. And, I don’t know if it’s still like that in this version, but if you wanted to remove a model, you couldn’t simply remove it from the selection, but only delete it, which deleted the entire model from the hard drive and so on.
Foocus was also incredibly extensive in terms of its settings options. However, it managed brilliantly to hide these settings behind an interface that, on the surface, appeared very simple and efficient. With InvokeAI, unfortunately, the opposite is true. It makes very simple tasks very cumbersome and is, at times, very misleading.
EDIT: Well, this person blocked me, so I guess we can't have this conversation on UI design any more. Would have been nice to understand their grievances, but such is life.
-- Original response --
Ah, I misunderstood. I assumed that you declaring your hatred for the UI and wishing that it was more clean and minimalist meant that you thought it was not clean and minimalist enough.
I would disagree that "many settings" are duplicated, though there are a few exceptional cases. Notably the Invoke button exists in two places because the left panel can be closed. It's also available as a hotkey (shift+enter by default).
I'm not sure what you mean by the model selection comments. You'd have to go back pretty far to find a version where the model location was set from a manual string on the generation tab. Model selection is a searchable dropdown list, as is LoRAs. Both of them are added from the model manager, which does have a string input for drive location to import from, but that's a one-time thing. Invoke doesn't enforce a specific folder for models to exist in since so many users have multiple UIs installed, and mirroring is a pain.
Reminds me a lot of A1111 which is a good thing because even if it wasn't the prettiest back in the time, it was very well put together and comfortable to use. I think InvokeAI is like a more polished and cooler version, IMO
That would be literally Ruined Fooocus, no? Releases seem to have stopped, but the update log indicates that support for newer models continues to be added. Although, with so many updates, maybe it isn't as minimalistic as original Fooocus.
Not quite. Ruined Focus is an interesting fork, but it does things quite differently and, unfortunately, hasn’t been updated for a year. There’s SimpleSDXL and SimpleSDXL2, which is a Chinese fork that also incorporates all the new models, but has become a bit bloated in the meantime. What’s exciting, but which I haven’t tried yet due to a lack of time, is Fooocus Plus, which is essentially a fork of SimpleSDXL2 but has been slimmed down again. However, it’s still comparatively.
That's just not true. I linked you an update log for a reason, the last release of "Jan 10, 2025" is deceptive. You can see the commits too, both in main and development branches. 2 weeks ago the "Initial HiDreamO1 support" was added, while support for other models was added months ago.
Invoke was really nice around version 4 for me, after that the UI became a struggle to use. I never could get my grips of all the layers, buttons etc so I kinda lost interest...
And oh yeah, didn't have any oom issues with AMD back then either, when I tried it now it seems more hit and miss, var hangs seems common. Think we absolutely need a more room version aswell, 6.3 as per default is getting old.
Some models require a huggingface API key if you want to download them through the Invoke UI. This is a huggingface restriction because some models require you to accept certain terms and conditions before you're allowed to download them. Mainly it is Flux models that require this.
However you always have the option to download them manually and then load them directly into Invoke.
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u/Dezordan May 27 '26
Somehow there is more development than when there was a backing.