Nano Banana vs Imagen 4

Nano Banana costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $20.00 per 1M output tokens, whereas Imagen 4 costs $40.00 input and $0.00 output. Overall, Nano Banana is the more cost-effective model for high-volume API pipelines. Both models support prompt caching discounts of up to 90% for repeated prompt prefixes.

Nano Banana supports a context window of 33K tokens (~25k words), while Imagen 4 supports 2K tokens (~2k words). Therefore, Nano Banana can process more textual data and document context in a single prompt.

Nano Banana scores at the frontier of coding benchmarks, while Imagen 4 scores competitively for software generation. For complex autonomous debugging and agentic engineering, Nano Banana provides robust code generation and tool calling.

Nano Banana features native chain-of-thought extended thinking mode with configurable reasoning effort. In contrast, Imagen 4 focuses on standard fast inference.

Nano Banana generates approximately 60 tokens per second, while Imagen 4 delivers 25 tokens per second. In latency-sensitive production environments, Nano Banana provides faster time-to-first-token (TTFT) and higher streaming response velocity.

Yes! High-efficiency architectures route high-frequency routine classification and conversational tasks to Nano Banana to save operational costs, and dynamically escalate complex architectural queries or reasoning tasks to Imagen 4. This tiered routing pattern cuts overall API bills by up to 70%.