Runway vs Midjourney: Who wins the battle for Character Consistency?

A practical guide for creators choosing between Midjourney and Runway when it comes to keeping your characters consistent across scenes, frames, and formats.

Let’s face it: nothing kills immersion faster than your protagonist waking up with a new face in every frame.

If you’re a creator working with AI tools for any type of storytelling, animated or not, you’ve likely run into the problem of character consistency: keeping a character’s appearance the same across multiple images or video scenes. You know this is the difference between a polished story and an amazing mess.

So which tool is better at keeping your character looking like themselves?

Let's compare static screens generated with Midjourney and Runway, two of the leading AI generation platforms, each with their own strengths, quirks, and learning curves.

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🎨 Midjourney: The champion of Still Image consistency

Midjourney is the King of AI Art. Its advantage is that it’s focused on static images, which is what we will be testing today.

Omni Reference in v7 allows you to put characters, objects, vehicles, or non-human creatures from a reference image into your Midjourney creations.

Just add your character to the space in the right:

The Omni Reference weight parameter --ow allows you to control how much detail from your reference image appears in your new image. You can set this parameter to any value between 1 and 1,000, with the default being --ow 100.

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🎥 Runway: The master of video continuity

Runway’s real strength is focusing on character consistency in video, and while today we will be testing static images, this focus may give this tool an edge.

Gen-4 References allow you to generate consistent characters in new images across endless lighting conditions, locations and treatments. All with just a single reference image of your characters.

Being able to tag each image and use it the tag in the prompt is a very handy feature that I wish others would copy as fast as they could.

More important, Runway lets you add three references, not just one like Midjourney.

ok, then. Let’s test.