Pony vs Illustrious: The Short Answer
Pony Diffusion V6 XL is a multi-domain SDXL fine-tune trained on roughly 2.6 million images spanning anthro, feral, human, anime and cartoon, prompted through a mandatory score_9 quality stack and source_* domain tags. Illustrious XL v0.1 is a narrower, deeper anime-focused SDXL fine-tune trained on roughly 7.5 million Danbooru-style images, prompted with plain booru tags and no score system. Pick Pony if you need anthro, hybrid styles or the deepest LoRA library; pick Illustrious if you need clean anime and clean human anatomy out of the box.
One-line verdicts: anthro and furry — Pony. Pure anime — Illustrious. Photoreal through a fine-tune — Pony. Starting a fresh 2026 project with no legacy — Illustrious. Cross-domain weirdness in a single model — Pony. Stable aesthetic without prompt gymnastics — Illustrious.
What's New In April 2026: V7 And 2.0
The reason this comparison matters right now is that both lineages just shipped major versions in the last few weeks, and they did it in opposite directions.
Pony V7 dropped earlier this month on the AuraFlow base. That is not an SDXL fine-tune anymore. It is a different architecture, which means every Pony V6 LoRA, embedding and ControlNet workflow you have collected over the last two years does not load. The score-tag system is reworked. The community is split between people who want the better architecture and people who want their LoRA library to keep working. Civitai is currently a graveyard of incompatible files with the same author names.
Illustrious 2.0 shipped a few weeks before that and stayed on SDXL. Existing v0.1 LoRAs and fine-tunes mostly continue to work, with some retraining recommended for best results but not required. OnomaAI chose continuity over architecture jump.
The result is a strange moment. The "obvious" upgrade path on the Pony side breaks everything. The "boring" continuity path on the Illustrious side is suddenly the safer ecosystem bet. People who locked in on Pony in 2024 are reconsidering.
This article anchors on Pony V6 XL and Illustrious v0.1 because those are the versions in the catalog, those are the versions ninety percent of fine-tunes are built on, and those are the versions you actually have to choose between if you are loading something in ComfyUI today. V7 and 2.0 get a forward-looking section near the end.
Dataset and Training Philosophy
Pony V6 XL was trained on approximately 2.6 million images. The dataset is deliberately multi-domain. It contains anthro and feral content, human content, Western cartoon content and anime content, all in the same model. Astralite's stated philosophy was a single model that could do "any" character style, with the score-tag and source-tag systems acting as a steering mechanism to push the model into a chosen domain at inference time.
This is why Pony feels like four models stitched together. Because it kind of is.
Illustrious XL v0.1 went the other direction. Approximately 7.5 million Danbooru-tagged images, almost entirely anime and anime-adjacent. Three times the data of Pony, but in roughly a quarter of the conceptual surface area. Where Pony spreads its 2.6M images across five domains, Illustrious spends 7.5M images learning anime more thoroughly than any prior open SDXL fine-tune.
The practical consequence: Illustrious knows more anime characters by name, has cleaner anime composition priors, and produces more aesthetically consistent anime outputs without prompt engineering. Pony knows fewer named characters in any single domain but can do things Illustrious physically cannot — a feral dragon, a Disney-style raccoon, a Western cartoon adult animation aesthetic — without a LoRA.
Pony is broad. Illustrious is deep. Neither is wrong.
Prompt Syntax: score_9 vs Plain Tags
This is the most visible difference and the one new users trip on first.
Pony V6 requires a quality-tag prelude. Without it, output quality collapses to the level of the lowest-rated training images. The convention is the full descending stack:
``text # Pony V6 XL score_9, score_8_up, score_7_up, score_6_up, score_5_up, score_4_up, source_anime, 1girl, solo, standing in a forest clearing, soft morning light, detailed background, looking at viewer, casual outfit ``
You also need a source_* tag. source_anime, source_pony, source_furry, source_cartoon. Pick one. Without it the model picks for you, often badly.
Illustrious does not work this way. There is no score-tag system. Standard Danbooru aesthetic tags do most of the steering:
``text # Illustrious XL v0.1 masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic, 1girl, solo, standing in a forest clearing, soft morning light, detailed background, looking at viewer, casual outfit ``
The masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic cluster is convention rather than requirement — Illustrious will produce reasonable output without it, just less curated. This is closer to the prompting most SD users learned on SD1.5 and SDXL base, which is part of why the Illustrious learning curve is shorter for migrators.
Two practical notes. First, the score-tag prelude in Pony also works in negative prompts: score_1, score_2, score_3, source_pony in the negative is a common Pony move when you want to push away from the lowest-rated training material or away from the cartoon-pony domain specifically. Illustrious has no equivalent lever. Second, weight syntax ((tag:1.2)) works the same in both — that part is just SDXL.
Style Range and Anatomy
Pony's strength and weakness are the same thing: the dataset is wide.
Anthro and feral content — fox-people, dragons, kemonomimi at the dragon-and-scales end of the spectrum, fully feral animals — is genuinely best-in-class on Pony V6. There is nothing else in the open SDXL space that does this range without a stack of LoRAs. Western cartoon styles — Disney-shaped faces, Pixar-shaped proportions, Adventure Time-flat shading — are also accessible from a base prompt. This is why Pony became the substrate for so many adult animation projects in 2024-2025.
Pony's weakness is pure anime. It can do anime — that is what source_anime is for — but the output has a faint "pony-ness" baked in. Faces are slightly rounder, eyes slightly larger, line weight slightly inconsistent. To experienced anime users it looks like anime filtered through a different model's priors, because that is exactly what it is.
Illustrious is the inverse. Anime is clean. Faces, hands, anatomy, clothing folds, composition all sit in a more cohesive aesthetic space without prompt gymnastics. Human anatomy in particular is meaningfully better than Pony's stock human output — fingers, feet, joint articulation tend to land correctly more often. Illustrious also has stronger named-character knowledge for anime/manga IPs, because Danbooru's tagging is character-dense by design.
Illustrious's weakness is anthro and Western cartoon. It can be pushed there with LoRAs, but the base model has very little signal in those directions. Asking Illustrious for a furry character is asking against the grain of its training distribution. You will get something. It will not look like Pony's something.
NSFW Behavior
Both models default to uncensored. Both are anatomically competent without jailbreak prompts. The differences are in steerability and aesthetic stability.
Pony's score-tag system doubles as an NSFW control surface. Negative-prompting score_1, score_2 pushes away from low-quality training material, which correlates with sloppy anatomy. Combining source_* tags with explicit content tags lets you steer between, for example, anime-style explicit content and anthro explicit content without switching models. This is the lever that made Pony load-bearing for the 2024-2025 NSFW open-source scene.
Illustrious does not have score-tag negation, but it does not really need it. The Danbooru-trained aesthetic baseline is high enough that explicit content tends to land in a stable visual register without much prompt scaffolding. Anatomy is consistent. Composition is consistent. The output looks like it was tagged by the same humans across the dataset, because it was.
Honest verdict: explicit anthro and hybrid content, Pony. Clean anime explicit content, Illustrious. Photoreal explicit content, neither base — you want a fine-tune (see next section). Treat both bases as starting points for explicit work, not endpoints.
Ecosystem and Fine-Tunes
This is where the catalog matters and where the "which lineage do I commit to" question gets concrete.
Pony's LoRA and fine-tune ecosystem is the larger one as of early 2026. Estimates put Pony-compatible LoRAs on Civitai and mirrors at fifteen thousand-plus, with the count having grown for two solid years. The Pony fine-tune family includes the realism branch — models that take Pony V6 and push it toward photographic output, often by mixing in SDXL-realistic checkpoints. CyberRealistic Pony, RealMixPony, WAI-REAL_CN, Babes by Stable Yogi all sit in this branch. Prefect Pony XL is closer to a stylistic refinement of base Pony rather than a realism push. The realism branch is genuinely impressive — these models are why "Pony for photoreal" became a viable answer in 2025.
Illustrious's fine-tune curve is younger but accelerating. Through 2025 a clear migration happened: anime fine-tune authors who previously built on Pony or on Animagine started shipping Illustrious-based versions. Hassaku XL got an Illustrious branch. WAI shipped an Illustrious-SDXL variant alongside its Pony work. Prefect shipped both lineages. Animagine XL sits adjacent to Illustrious as the older anime-focused SDXL line and remains a useful comparison point.
The trajectory matters. Pony's library is bigger today. Illustrious's library is growing faster. If V7's broken compatibility holds — and as of this week it looks like it will — Illustrious's ecosystem catches up sometime in 2026.
Hardware: Both Same VRAM
Both models are SDXL base. Both fit comfortably in 8 GB of VRAM with standard ComfyUI memory management, comfortably in 12 GB without thinking about it, and run identically on a 24 GB card. Inference speed is essentially identical at matched resolution and steps. A 1024x1024 image at 30 steps takes the same wall-clock time on either model on the same GPU.
The compute decision is not a factor. Pick on output, not on hardware.
Big Comparison Table
| Dimension | Pony Diffusion V6 XL | Illustrious XL v0.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Dataset size | ~2.6M images | ~7.5M images |
| Domain coverage | Anthro, feral, human, anime, Western cartoon | Anime / Danbooru, narrow |
| Prompt syntax | Mandatory score_9 stack + source_* tag | Plain Danbooru tags, optional aesthetic prelude |
| Anatomy out of box | Mid; better with realism fine-tune | Strong, especially hands and proportions |
| Anime quality | Decent with source_anime, slight Pony-flavor | Clean, consistent, character-dense |
| Anthro / furry | Best-in-class for open SDXL | Weak without LoRA |
When To Pick Each
Pick Pony V6 XL if any of these are true: you need anthro, furry or feral content; you want cross-domain hybrid output from a single model; you want the deepest LoRA library that exists for open SDXL; you want photoreal output through a realism fine-tune like CyberRealistic Pony or RealMixPony; you already have a Pony workflow and your LoRA collection is load-bearing for your work.
Pick Illustrious v0.1 if any of these are true: you are doing pure anime and want it to look like anime, not like Pony's anime; you want clean human anatomy in the base model without a realism fine-tune layer; you are starting a new project in 2026 with no Pony legacy to migrate; you want named-character anime knowledge built in; you want a shorter prompt without the score-tag prelude.
Pick both if you have the disk space. They are not really substitutes. They are different tools that overlap on one axis (anime) and diverge on every other.
What About V7 And 2.0?
Forward-looking section, kept short because anything written about a two-week-old model release ages badly.
Pony V7 on AuraFlow is the bigger architecture bet. AuraFlow is a more modern base than SDXL. Output quality on raw V7 is higher than V6 in side-by-side anime and human comparisons that have circulated this month. Anthro and Western cartoon performance appears at least at parity with V6, possibly better. The cost is real: every Pony V6 LoRA you own does not load. ControlNet integrations need new versions. The fine-tune family — CyberRealistic Pony, Babes, RealMixPony — is on V6 and will need months to migrate, if it migrates at all. Some of those authors have publicly said they are evaluating whether the move is worth it.
Illustrious 2.0 stays on SDXL. Improvements are incremental — better anatomy, better aesthetic stability, expanded character coverage — but the migration cost is near zero. v0.1 LoRAs work. v0.1 workflows work. The fine-tune family carries forward.
If you are starting today and you want stability, V6 still has the largest ecosystem and Illustrious 2.0 inherits v0.1's. If you are chasing the 2026 cutting edge, V7 is the bigger jump but you will be building on bare ground for the next two quarters. There is no wrong answer, only different bets.
