Nano Banana 2 Lite vs GPT-4o
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-4o is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (80 vs 1).
- •Nano Banana 2 Lite is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-4o is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Nano Banana 2 Lite | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | Not announced | ✓128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Not announced | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | 33.6 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Nano Banana 2 Lite | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | - |
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| MATH | - | 76.6% |
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 GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses