Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Nano Banana 2 Lite
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is meaningfully stronger at speed (98 vs 9 on our capability index).
- •Nano Banana 2 Lite is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Haiku 4.5 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Nano Banana 2 Lite | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓200K | Not announced |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.00 | ✓Not announced |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5.00 | 33.6 |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Nano Banana 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | - |
| GPQA | 64.6% | - |
| MMLU Pro | 80.0% | - |
| Arena.ai Text-to-Image Leaderboard | - | Ranked #5 |
| Text-to-Image Elo Score | - | 1251 |
| Single-Image Editing Elo Score | - | 1308 |
| Multiple-Image Editing Elo Score | - | 1294 |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if...
- →You need high throughput and low latency at minimal cost
- →You are fanning out many parallel sub-agents or worker calls
- →You want solid coding/computer-use quality without Opus/Sonnet pricing
- →Your task fits comfortably within a 200K context window
Choose Nano Banana 2 Lite if...
- →When cost-per-sample is the primary constraint
- →For workflows requiring 100+ images per session
- →When generation latency must be under 5 seconds
- →For rapid prototyping and exploration