All tasks / Comparisons

Nano Banana 2.1 vs Seedream 5.0 Pro

Compared only on public benchmark results, across the 2 tasks where both are listed: Nano Banana 2.1 is a tier higher in 1 of 2 shared tasks, they share a tier in 1.

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

Seedream 5.0 Pro

ByteDance Seed's proprietary text-to-image and editing model family; 5.0 Pro is the top tier, 5.0 Lite the cheaper one.

Vendor: ByteDance Seed
Weights: Closed: API and apps only
Released: 8 Jul 2026
API price: $0.09 per image (API price listed by Artificial Analysis for "Seedream 5.0 Pro": $90 per 1k images)
License: proprietary
Last verified: 18 Oct 2026

Alternatives to Seedream 5.0 Pro

Task by task

Task	Nano Banana 2.1	Seedream 5.0 Pro	Higher tier
Image generation Models	A1,174 on Artificial Analysis Text to Image Arena (AA-Image-T2I v2.1) · Cloud	B1,100 on Artificial Analysis Text to Image Arena (AA-Image-T2I v2.1) · Cloud	Nano Banana 2.1
Image editing Models	A1,152 on Artificial Analysis Image Editing Arena (AA-Image-Editing v2.1) · Cloud	A1,133 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	Seedream 5.0 Pro	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	1,133 Seedream 5.0 Pro	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	1,100 Seedream 5.0 Pro	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	1,394 seedream-5.0-pro	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	1,255 seedream-5.0-pro	7 Oct 2026