All tasks / Comparisons

Nano Banana 2.1 vs Grok Imagine Image 2.0

Compared only on public benchmark results, across the 2 tasks where both are listed: they share a tier in 2.

Nano Banana 2.1

Google's Flash-tier native Gemini image generation and editing model with 1K-4K output and search grounding.

Vendor: Google
Weights: Closed: API and apps only
Released: 6 Oct 2026
API price: $0.03 per image (1K (1024x1024) output, Standard tier: $30 per 1M image output tokens = $0.0336/image; 2K $0.0504, 4K $0.113)
License: proprietary
Last verified: 18 Oct 2026

Alternatives to Nano Banana 2.1

Grok Imagine Image 2.0

xAI's proprietary image generation and editing model behind Grok Imagine, available in Grok apps and the xAI API.

Vendor: xAI
Weights: Closed: API and apps only
Released: 7 Aug 2026
API price: $0.04 per image (grok-imagine-image-2.0, 1K and 2K output, per xAI docs)
License: proprietary
Last verified: 18 Oct 2026

Alternatives to Grok Imagine Image 2.0

Task by task

Task	Nano Banana 2.1	Grok Imagine Image 2.0	Higher tier
Image generation Models	A1,174 on Artificial Analysis Text to Image Arena (AA-Image-T2I v2.1) · Cloud	A1,167 on Artificial Analysis Text to Image Arena (AA-Image-T2I v2.1) · Cloud	Same tier
Image editing Models	A1,152 on Artificial Analysis Image Editing Arena (AA-Image-Editing v2.1) · Cloud	A1,118 on Artificial Analysis Image Editing Arena (AA-Image-Editing v2.1) · Cloud	Same tier

A tier spans a range of scores, and small gaps on a leaderboard are often within its margin of error, so only a different tier counts as ahead. How we rank.

Same benchmark, both results

Benchmark	Nano Banana 2.1	Grok Imagine Image 2.0	Snapshot
Artificial Analysis Image Editing Arena (AA-Image-Editing v2.1) Elo from pairwise human preference (FLUX.2 [dev] anchored at 1000), higher is better	1,152 Nano Banana 2.1	1,118 Grok Imagine Image 2.0	18 Oct 2026
Artificial Analysis Text to Image Arena (AA-Image-T2I v2.1) Elo from pairwise human preference (FLUX.2 [dev] anchored at 1000), higher is better	1,174 Nano Banana 2.1	1,167 Grok Imagine Image 2.0	18 Oct 2026
LMArena Image Edit Arena Arena score (Bradley-Terry rating from pairwise human votes), higher is better	1,428 gemini-nano-banana-2.1	1,439 grok-imagine-image-2.0 (canvas)	6 Oct 2026
LMArena Text-to-Image Arena Arena score (Bradley-Terry rating from pairwise human votes), higher is better	1,328 gemini-nano-banana-2.1	1,334 grok-imagine-image-2.0 (canvas)	7 Oct 2026