A recently developed PLUS factorization holds great promise in image coding due to its simplicity and integer reversibility. However, existing PLUS factorizations did not consider stability and optimality. To address these problems, we propose methodologies to design stable and optimal PLUS factorization algorithms. Firstly, we propose three stable PLUS factorization algorithms, prove the stability theorem under no perturbation and analyze stability under perturbation. Furthermore, we obtain a closed-form formula for transform error, and use the formula to design an algorithm for optimal PLUS factorization. Then, we apply the PLUS factorization to image coding. The integer DCTs implemented with the optimal PLUS factorizations found by our algorithms outperform the integer DCT with expansion factors in terms of entropy. The optimal PLUS factorizations are superior to the lifting factorization in JPEG-XR. The experimental results agree with analytical results of PLUS factorization, and show superior performance of our algorithms in image coding.