Krea 3 vs Nano Banana 2: The Editor and the Workhorse

The comparison gets interesting at the one point where the two models overlap, and it is not where you would guess. Nano Banana 2 — Google's gemini-3.1-flash-image, in consumer hands since 26 February 2026 and on the developer API since 28 May 2026 — both generates and edits. Krea 3, released on 15 October 2026, only edits, and does nothing else. So the matchup is not "which is the better image model." It is: for the editing half of your pipeline, do you use the editor that was built for nothing else, or the generalist you may already be paying for? Krea 3's answer is a price and a clock. Nano Banana 2's answer is a ceiling and a leaderboard placement — and, inconveniently for Krea, a deprecation notice that landed nine days before Krea 3 shipped.

The number that changed in October

On 6 October 2026, Google's Gemini API changelog deprecated gemini-3.1-flash-image — the identifier that is Nano Banana 2 — and named Nano Banana 2.1 as the migration target. Nano Banana 2.1 is the model under the API id gemini-nano-banana-2.1, described by Google as an update to Nano Banana 2 and the primary high-efficiency workhorse for generation and conversational editing.

That changes what "Krea 3 vs Nano Banana 2" means. You are no longer choosing between a new editor and a current generalist. You are choosing between a new editor and a generalist that Google has put on a migration path.

• Nano Banana 2 is superseded, not withdrawn. Deprecation in Google's changelog starts a clock; it does not switch the model off. Existing integrations keep working.

• Nano Banana 2.1 is not on OrcaRouter. What our catalogue carries is Nano Banana 2's preview identifier, google/gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview, at Google list price with no markup. The successor is Google's own migration to run.

• Krea 3 is nine days old and on nothing but vendor and partner endpoints. No deprecation risk yet, and no migration path either, because there is no successor to migrate to.

Price per call, and what a resolution tier does to it

Both models publish rates that look close and behave differently across resolutions.

• Krea 3 — $0.03 per image at 1K, $0.06 at 2K. Flat, per image, published as list price in Krea's FAQ, with the company saying it expects the number to fall rather than rise.

• Nano Banana 2 — billed at $60 per million output tokens by Google, which resolves to roughly $0.045 at 512 pixels, $0.067 at 1024×1024, $0.101 at 2K and $0.151 at 4K. Batch pricing is half the standard rate.

• Artificial Analysis lists Nano Banana 2 at $67 per 1,000 images in its October snapshot, consistent with the 1K resolution figure.

• At 2K the two are within a cent of each other — $0.06 against $0.101. That is the resolution tier where a Krea 3 edit is genuinely cheaper, and it is also the tier Krea renders natively.

The 4K column is where Nano Banana 2 wins on capability rather than price. Krea 3 does 4K "for print"; Nano Banana 2 does 4K as one of its standard tiers at $0.151, which is more expensive per call than the equivalent Krea 3 edit and delivers a resolution Krea 3's native pipeline does not target. Neither of those is a defect. They are different answers to "how big does the output need to be."

The leaderboard, where one model has 15,775 votes and the other has none

This is the least contestable part of the comparison and it goes entirely one way.

• Nano Banana 2 on Artificial Analysis, read 16 October 2026 — image editing 1,120 Elo from 15,775 samples, in the board's 7-13 rank band; text-to-image 1,138 Elo from 15,683 samples, seventh on the board. The sample counts are large enough that the intervals are narrow: the editing figure carries a 95% interval of 1,107 to 1,133.

• Krea 3 — nothing. No Artificial Analysis entry, no arena run, no third-party measurement, as of 16 October 2026. It shipped on 15 October.

• Krea's own claims are latency and price, not quality. The launch page leads with under eight seconds end to end at 2K and $0.06, and describes Krea 3 as "matches Nano Banana Pro or GPT Image 2.5 quality" in the launch announcement on X. Note which model that sentence names: Nano Banana Pro, the previous generation, not Nano Banana 2.

• The vendor's own comparison chart is honest about its method. Krea's speed demo states the timings are the median request-to-result time of each model's twelve-image batch including queue time, measured on Krea's platform between 24 September and 1 October 2026, and flags one comparison price as "a draft estimate pending validation."

One useful reading of the two boards: Nano Banana 2 scores 1,120 on editing against Nano Banana Pro's 1,106 and Nano Banana 2 Lite's 1,049 — a family spread across seventy Elo, which tells you Google has optimised the line unevenly rather than pushing one flagship. Krea 3 enters a board where the measured leaders are OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 pair at 1,198 and 1,177, and where it currently has no entry to place. Note also which model is not in that family on the editing board: Nano Banana 2's own successor, Nano Banana 2.1, sits third at 1,148, higher than any of the three.

What each model is actually for

The capability lists overlap less than the marketing suggests.

• Nano Banana 2 generates and edits. Text-to-image, in-image text rendering including translation and localisation, up to five characters and fourteen objects held consistent across a workflow, output up to 4K across fourteen aspect ratios including narrow formats like 1:4 and 1:8 for banners and phone wallpapers, and a 512-pixel tier. Web and image search grounding is available, as are Minimal and High thinking levels.

• Krea 3 only edits, and that is the design. Up to six reference images per edit, bounding boxes for placing new elements, multi-turn edits that hold, and a precision mode that leaves pixels outside the edit area alone. Krea's launch page lists its four strengths as product scene changes, object removal, photo cleanup and typography that survives an edit — "change the setting around a product and the label stays sharp."

• The one capability Krea 3 has that Nano Banana 2 does not publish is LoRA training on the edit model. Krea calls Krea 3 the first editing model you can fine-tune on a specific product, person or style, and its API reference carries a custom-style training endpoint. Nano Banana 2's consistency story is reference-driven and capped at five characters and fourteen objects.

• Provenance is a real difference. Every Nano Banana 2 output carries SynthID watermarking and C2PA provenance by default. That is a feature for some buyers and a disqualifier for others, and Krea 3's page says nothing about either.

If your pipeline needs to create an image from a sentence, Nano Banana 2 is the only one of the two that can. If it needs to take an approved asset and change exactly one thing, the editor built for that job is the more direct instrument — and the generalist's editing mode is a mode, not a model.

Locally, on one key

The availability split matters here more than in most of our comparisons, because one of these two models is on our catalogue and the other is not.

OrcaRouter routes Nano Banana 2 through google/gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview at Google's own list price with 0% markup — provider list price passed straight through, so a Google price change is live on our side the same day. We do not route Krea 3, and we do not route Nano Banana 2.1; those are vendor and partner endpoints. Being honest about that is the point of a comparison page.

What a router is worth to a two-model image pipeline is the part that is not either model. Automatic failover means a provider's bad afternoon is a routing event rather than an outage. The routing DSL lets a generation step and an edit step live in one call instead of two integrations. And because the passthrough is at cost, the only thing a vendor price change does to your bill is change it — there is no margin layer that has to be renegotiated first.

So which one

• Editing volume at 2K with a price ceiling — Krea 3. $0.06 flat against $0.101 at the same resolution, under eight seconds, and a published intention to reduce the number further.

• Anything that has to be generated rather than edited — Nano Banana 2. Not a close call; Krea 3 has no generation path at all.

• Wide formats, 4K, or 512-pixel tiers — Nano Banana 2. Fourteen aspect ratios including the narrow banner shapes, and resolution tiers on both sides of Krea 3's native 2K.

• You need a measured score before you commit — Nano Banana 2, and it is not the model Google wants you on. That is the awkward part of this matchup, and it will not resolve until either Krea 3 gets an entry on the editing board or Nano Banana 2's deprecation clock runs out.

The unglamorous conclusion is that these two are complements wearing the same job title. Nano Banana 2 makes the image and can touch it up; Krea 3 only touches it up, and does it for a little over half the price at the resolution most catalogues actually need. The real decision is not between them — it is whether the editing half of your pipeline deserves a specialist, and Google's own changelog has just made that question slightly easier to say yes to.