Nano Banana 2 Lite vs Gemma 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 9).
Specs comparison
| Nano Banana 2 Lite | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | Not announced | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) |
| Input / 1M tokens | Not announced | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | 33.6 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Nano Banana 2 Lite | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | - |
| MATH (27B) | - | 89% |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | - | 64.9% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
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
Choose Gemma 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a size to match your hardware
- →Multilingual or multimodal tasks on-prem
- →Privacy-sensitive or offline deployments
- →Fine-tuning on your own data