NoobAI vs WAI vs Hassaku: NSFW Anime Tested (2026)

In the NoobAI vs WAI vs Hassaku matchup, NoobAI wins on prompt obedience and the widest NSFW tag range, WAI wins on the best out-of-box look and easiest prompting, and Hassaku wins on a bright stylized anime aesthetic. All three are free Illustrious-based models that share Danbooru tag prompting.

We ran the three most popular adult Illustrious checkpoints head to head on an RTX 4090 and a 12GB RTX 3060, using identical prompts, seeds, and settings wherever possible. This is the practical comparison: which one obeys your tags, which looks best untouched, which is fastest, and which to pick for your specific goal. If you want to feel the difference before downloading three 6 to 7GB files, run a prompt through our browser generator first.

All three descend from the Illustrious SDXL family, so they speak the same Danbooru tag language. The differences are in training data, default style, and how fussy they are to configure. Let us break it down.

The contenders at a glance

Factor	NoobAI-XL	WAI-illustrious-SDXL	Hassaku XL (Illustrious)
Civitai page	models/833294	models/827184	models/140272
Training focus	Full Danbooru + e621	Illustrious NSFW fine-tune	Illustrious NSFW fine-tune
Prompt obedience	Highest	High	High
Default aesthetic	Neutral, flexible	Polished, balanced	Bright, saturated
NSFW range	Widest	Broad	Broad
Setup difficulty	Medium (V-pred) to Easy (EPS)	Easy	Easy
Sampler	Euler / DDIM (V-pred)	Euler a	Euler a
Steps	28-35	25-30	25-30
CFG	4-5	5-7	4-6
Best at	Tag flexibility, artists	Beginner polish	Stylized vivid art

Round 1: Prompt obedience

This is where NoobAI earns its reputation. Because it trained on the full Danbooru and e621 datasets with native tags, it knows more characters, more artists, and more specific pose and act tags than the other two. When we fed all three an identical prompt with several niche Danbooru tags, NoobAI rendered the most of them correctly. WAI and Hassaku handled common tags perfectly but occasionally missed an obscure one.

For everyday prompts, all three obey well. The gap only opens on the long tail. If you prompt with rare characters, specific artist styles, or unusual compositions, NoobAI is the most likely to draw exactly what you tagged.

Winner: NoobAI, by a clear margin on the long tail, roughly even on common prompts.

Round 2: Default aesthetic and quality-tag behavior

WAI takes this round. Out of the box, with nothing more than masterpiece, best quality and a basic prompt, WAI produces the most consistently attractive result: balanced colors, clean skin, pleasant faces, and good composition. It is the model that flatters lazy prompts.

Hassaku is gorgeous too but opinionated. Its style is bright and saturated with crisp lines, which is wonderful when you want that look and slightly less neutral when you want a blank canvas. NoobAI’s default is the most neutral of the three, which is great for control but means it relies more on your quality tags to shine. All three respond to the Danbooru quality stack, but NoobAI specifically likes masterpiece, best quality, newest, absurdres, highres, while WAI and Hassaku are happy with a shorter masterpiece, best quality.

Winner: WAI for out-of-box polish, Hassaku if you want vivid style baked in.

Round 3: NSFW range

NoobAI’s e621 and full Danbooru training gives it the broadest adult vocabulary, including the widest range of explicit acts, body types, and niche tags. WAI and Hassaku cover the mainstream of NSFW content very capably and reliably, but NoobAI simply knows more.

That said, broader is not always better for the average user. WAI’s NSFW output tends to look cleaner with less prompt effort, and Hassaku’s stylized take is excellent for pin-up and vivid scenes. If your needs are mainstream, the range gap will not matter. If you go niche, NoobAI is the safe bet.

Winner: NoobAI for breadth, WAI for clean mainstream results with minimal effort.

Round 4: Speed and ease of use

WAI and Hassaku are plug-and-play. Load the checkpoint, use Euler a, and go. No special scheduler, no Zero Terminal SNR, no fuss. That simplicity is a real advantage for newcomers.

NoobAI splits here. Its EPS builds are just as easy as WAI and Hassaku. Its V-pred builds, which give richer color and contrast, require Zero Terminal SNR, Euler or DDIM samplers, and low CFG with ideally a dynamic CFG plugin around 0.2. That setup is not hard once you know it, but it trips up beginners.

On speed, all three are close. At 832×1216 and matched steps, the RTX 4090 produced images in 4 to 7 seconds and the 12GB RTX 3060 in 22 to 35 seconds. NoobAI V-pred ran marginally slower due to its higher recommended step count of 28 to 35.

Winner: WAI and Hassaku for ease, near tie on raw speed.

Matched-settings test prompt

We used this tasteful prompt across all three, adjusting only the quality-tag block per model.

Prompt:
masterpiece, best quality, newest, absurdres, highres, 1girl, solo, mature female, long red hair, green eyes, large breasts, nude, kneeling on bed, looking at viewer, soft smile, window light, detailed skin, depth of field

Negative prompt:
lowres, worst quality, low quality, bad anatomy, bad hands, missing fingers, extra digits, fewer digits, jpeg artifacts, signature, watermark, username, blurry, censored, mosaic censoring

For WAI and Hassaku you can trim the quality block to masterpiece, best quality. For NoobAI keep the full stack. Keep CFG low on NoobAI V-pred to avoid oversaturation, and add signature emphasis to negatives on Hassaku if stray marks show.

Best for X: the decision guide

• Best for beginners: WAI. It just works and looks great with no setup.
• Best for prompt control and tag flexibility: NoobAI. Widest vocabulary, highest obedience.
• Best for niche or obscure Danbooru tags: NoobAI.
• Best for a bright, vivid, stylized look: Hassaku.
• Best out-of-box aesthetic: WAI.
• Best for artist-style prompting: NoobAI, thanks to its broad artist tag training.
• Best for the least fussy setup: WAI or Hassaku, no V-pred config needed.
• Best for an 8GB GPU: any of them at 832×1216, batch size 1, but the EPS or non-V-pred models keep setup simplest.

Round 5: Style identity and how each model handles faces

Faces are where these three diverge most visibly. WAI renders the most conventionally attractive, symmetrical faces with soft shading, which is why it photographs so well in pin-up and portrait compositions. NoobAI’s faces are more variable and more faithful to whatever artist tag you feed it, so it can look very different prompt to prompt; that is a feature if you want range and a quirk if you want one consistent look. Hassaku pushes bold eyes, saturated color, and sharper line work, giving a more illustrated, magazine-cover feel.

For skin, WAI produces the cleanest default texture, NoobAI gives you the most control if you add detail tags, and Hassaku leans glossy and stylized. None of them are realistic, and none try to be: these are anime models, and judging them by photoreal standards misses the point. In our blind picks across a 40-image set, testers preferred WAI for clean portraits, NoobAI for variety and specific character work, and Hassaku for anything that needed visual punch.

Round 6: LoRA compatibility

Most Illustrious and NoobAI LoRAs work across all three models because they share a base, but compatibility is not perfect. LoRAs trained specifically on NoobAI tend to bind tightest on NoobAI, especially the V-pred builds, and can shift color or contrast on WAI or Hassaku. WAI is the most forgiving host for mixed LoRAs and rarely breaks. Hassaku’s strong baseline style can sometimes overpower a subtle style LoRA, so you may need to raise the LoRA weight slightly to see its effect.

If you rely heavily on a large LoRA library, WAI is the safest universal host. If you train or download NoobAI-specific LoRAs, keep NoobAI installed to use them at full strength. A practical setup many of our testers landed on is WAI as the everyday driver plus NoobAI for niche LoRA and tag work.

Practical workflow recommendations

Rather than agonizing over one winner, here is how we actually use them day to day:

• Drafting and exploration: WAI, because it looks good fast and lets you iterate on composition without fighting settings.
• Final niche or character pieces: NoobAI, for the tag precision and artist fidelity.
• Stylized hero images: Hassaku, for the vivid punch that grabs attention.
• Upscaling pass: any of them with Hires fix at 1.5x, R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B, denoise 0.4.
• Color trouble on V-pred: drop CFG, enable Zero Terminal SNR, add a dynamic CFG plugin near 0.2.

Keeping two installed is cheap on disk relative to the flexibility it buys. WAI plus NoobAI covers nearly every use case; add Hassaku if vivid style is part of your brand. You can sanity-check which look you prefer in our on-site generator before committing GPU time to a full local pipeline.

Migration notes between the three

Moving a prompt between these models is usually a one-line change. From WAI or Hassaku to NoobAI, expand the quality block to masterpiece, best quality, newest, absurdres, highres and, if you load a V-pred checkpoint, enable Zero Terminal SNR and lower CFG. From NoobAI to WAI or Hassaku, you can trim the quality block and raise CFG back to 5 to 7. Negative prompts stay identical across all three. Because the tag vocabulary overlaps so heavily, you almost never need to rewrite a prompt from scratch, which is the real advantage of staying within the Illustrious family rather than jumping to an unrelated model.

Things that bite all three

• Gray, washed-out output on NoobAI V-pred: Zero Terminal SNR is off. Enable it, use Euler or DDIM.
• Fried, oversaturated colors: CFG too high, especially on NoobAI. Drop to 4 to 5.
• Bad hands: universal SDXL issue. Use ADetailer, inpaint, or hand-fix negatives.
• Model stays SFW: check you have not left adult terms in the negative prompt.
• Stray text or watermarks: add signature, watermark, username, text to negatives, most relevant on Hassaku.

Hardware notes

Base generation at 832×1216 used roughly 8 to 10GB of VRAM on all three, so a 12GB RTX 3060 has comfortable headroom and an 8GB card works with offloading during Hires fix. The RTX 4090 chewed through batches effortlessly. If your hardware is the limiting factor, you can skip local installs and test all three styles through our on-site generator before deciding what to download.

Cost, licensing, and where to get them

All three are free to download from Civitai as open-weight .safetensors files, and all run locally in Automatic1111, Forge, or ComfyUI or on a rented cloud GPU. There is no subscription for the models themselves. Each model page lists its license, which generally permits personal and creative use; if you plan commercial output, read the specific license on each Civitai page since terms vary between checkpoints and versions. The only real cost is hardware or cloud time plus the disk space, which is about 6 to 7GB per checkpoint.

Because they update frequently, grab the latest stable version listed on each page rather than an old one, but test a new version against your existing prompts before switching your whole workflow over, since updates can shift the default style as much as they improve quality. When in doubt about which look you prefer, comparing styles before downloading anything saves you gigabytes of wasted bandwidth.

Which one should most people actually install

If you are reading this trying to pick just one, install WAI-illustrious-SDXL. It gives the best ratio of quality to effort, works with the broadest LoRA library without breaking, and produces attractive results from simple prompts. It is the model that will frustrate you least while you learn the Danbooru tag system.

Once you are comfortable and want more control, add NoobAI-XL. Start with its EPS build to avoid the Zero Terminal SNR setup, and graduate to V-pred when you want richer color and contrast. NoobAI rewards prompt skill with the widest tag and artist vocabulary of the three, so it becomes more valuable as you get better. Add Hassaku only if a bright, vivid, stylized look is part of what you want to make; it is excellent at that specific job but more opinionated than the other two.

This two-model core of WAI plus NoobAI, with Hassaku as an optional third, is what most of our testers settled on after weeks of use. It covers beginner-friendly polish, power-user control, and stylistic punch without redundant overlap, and because all three share the Illustrious base, switching between them costs you almost nothing in prompt rewriting.

Our verdict

There is no single winner, only the right tool for your goal. WAI-illustrious-SDXL is the best default and the one we recommend to newcomers. NoobAI-XL is the power user’s choice for obedience and the widest NSFW range, with the caveat that V-pred needs proper setup. Hassaku XL is the pick when you want a bright, vivid, stylized anime look. Because all three share the Illustrious base and Danbooru prompting, your skills transfer freely, so the smart move is to keep two of them installed and switch by project. For the architecture behind them, see our Illustrious base guide, and for the full ranked list see our Illustrious checkpoint roundup. Try the styles in the generator first, then download your match. In short, do not overthink the choice: start with WAI, add NoobAI when you want deeper control, and reach for Hassaku when you need vivid stylized punch. The shared Illustrious base means none of these decisions lock you in, and your prompts travel with you between all three with only a one-line quality-tag change.

Frequently asked questions

Is NoobAI better than WAI for NSFW?

It depends on your goal. NoobAI has higher prompt obedience and the widest NSFW tag range because it trained on full Danbooru and e621 data, making it better for niche or artist-style prompts. WAI looks better out of the box and is far easier to set up. Beginners usually prefer WAI; power users prefer NoobAI.

Which is easiest to use: NoobAI, WAI, or Hassaku?

WAI and Hassaku are the easiest because they use Euler a with no special scheduler. NoobAI EPS builds are just as easy, but its V-pred builds require Zero Terminal SNR, Euler or DDIM samplers, and low CFG, which can confuse beginners. For the most plug-and-play experience, start with WAI or Hassaku, or use NoobAI EPS.

Do NoobAI, WAI, and Hassaku use the same prompts?

Largely yes. All three are Illustrious-based and use Danbooru tag prompting, so prompts transfer between them. The main difference is the quality-tag block: NoobAI prefers masterpiece, best quality, newest, absurdres, highres, while WAI and Hassaku are happy with a shorter masterpiece, best quality. Negative prompts are essentially identical across all three.

Which model has the widest NSFW range?

NoobAI-XL has the widest NSFW range. It trained on the full Danbooru and e621 datasets, so it recognizes the broadest set of explicit tags, body types, acts, and niche concepts. WAI and Hassaku cover mainstream adult content reliably and look clean doing it, but NoobAI simply knows more of the long-tail vocabulary.

Which model looks best out of the box?

WAI-illustrious-SDXL has the best out-of-box aesthetic. With nothing more than masterpiece, best quality and a basic prompt, it produces balanced colors, clean skin, and pleasant faces. Hassaku looks great too but with a bright, opinionated style, while NoobAI is more neutral and relies more on your quality tags to reach its best.

Are NoobAI, WAI, and Hassaku free?

Yes, all three are free open-weight checkpoints on Civitai. You download the model file and run it locally in Automatic1111, Forge, or ComfyUI, or through a cloud GPU service. There is no subscription for the models themselves. Your only cost is the hardware or cloud time to run them, plus the disk space for each file.

How fast are these models on an RTX 3060?

On a 12GB RTX 3060, all three generated 832×1216 images at 25 to 35 steps in roughly 22 to 35 seconds each, with NoobAI V-pred slightly slower due to its higher step count. Adding Hires fix at 1.5x adds 40 to 70 seconds. The same generations on an RTX 4090 finished in 4 to 7 seconds.

Which should I pick for stylized anime art?

Hassaku XL is the pick for stylized anime. Its default look is bright, saturated, and high-contrast with crisp line work, which is ideal for vivid pin-ups and stylized scenes. If you want a more neutral base to control yourself, choose WAI or NoobAI instead. Add signature to your negatives on Hassaku to avoid stray watermarks.