Krea 3 vs Grok Imagine Image 2.0 : un modèle a un Elo, l'autre a un chronomètre

There is a head-to-head table you can build for K​rea 3 and Grok Imagine Image 2.0, and then there is the one that actually exists. Grok Imagine Image 2.0 has been measured: x​AI's editor, released 7 August 2026, sits at 1,110 Elo on the Artificial Analysis image-editing leaderboard — thirteenth of the ranked models, on 7,792 blind comparisons, at a listed $60 per 1,000 images. K​rea 3, released 15 October 2026, has been measured by nobody. It arrives with a vendor stopwatch — under 8 seconds per edit at native 2K for $0.06 — and no third-party number of any kind. So this is less a contest between two editors than a choice between two kinds of evidence.

Les deux moitiés de ce contraste sont vraies et ni l'une ni l'autre n'annule l'autre. Un Elo vous dit ce qu'une foule préfère lorsqu'elle ne peut pas voir l'étiquette ; il ne peut pas vous dire si votre logo a survécu à la modification. Un chiffre de latence vous dit ce que l'infrastructure propre du fournisseur a fait sur les propres prompts du fournisseur ; il ne peut pas vous dire si le modèle est bon. Les lire ensemble est la seule façon honnête de choisir, et c'est ce que fait le reste de cet article.

Ce qu’est chacun, dans les propres mots du fournisseur

Grok Imagine Image 2.0 is positioned by x​AI as an editing environment rather than a one-shot generator, and its feature list reads like one: Magic Wand for region-level edits, segmentation for precise region selection, background removal, multi-image input, a Smart Resize that recomposes one image into nine aspect ratios by inventing new frame content rather than cropping, and templates for product photography, headshots, e-commerce listings, game assets and marketing posters. It is the default Quality Mode on grok.com/imagine and on mobile. The API additionally exposes aspect ratio — including 21:9 and 5:2, both new with 2.0 — resolution, and a low/medium/auto quality parameter.

K​rea 3 is narrower and stranger. It is an editor with no generator story attached: region-scoped changes in a drawn box, character consistency across a sequence, up to six references on the launch post and eight on the product page, native 2K, and a voice-note workflow in the app where you speak an instruction and get the edit back. Where G​rok ships named tools and presets for verticals, K​rea ships one mechanism — find the region, render only that — and a speed claim.

• Released — K​rea 3: 15 October 2026. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: 7 August 2026.

• Independent editing rank — K​rea 3: unranked, no entry. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: #13 at 1,110 Elo on 7,792 samples, per Artificial Analysis.

• Price — K​rea 3: $0.06 per image at 2K, $0.03 at 1K, flat. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: from $0.04 per image, billed at the quality tier actually served; the board's representative figure is $60 per 1,000.

• Speed — K​rea 3: under 8 seconds end to end at 2K, vendor-stated. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: no figure from x​AI and no independent measurement; the only seconds-per-edit number we can find for it is K​rea's own, at 19 seconds, which is a competitor's measurement on a competitor's traffic.

• Resize and reformat — K​rea 3: not a documented workflow; edits are region-scoped. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: Smart Resize across nine aspect ratios, recomposing rather than cropping.

• Multi-image input — K​rea 3: 6 or 8 depending which K​rea page you read. Grok Imagine Image 2.0: five source images per edit, per current documentation, up from the three the API capped at launch.

• Poids — aucun des deux. Pas de poids ouverts d'un côté comme de l'autre ; les deux sont des modèles hébergés.

Lisant un rang de treize

La tentation, avec un Elo, est de considérer le nombre comme un verdict. Il est plus utile comme carte des points de désaccord.

On the Artificial Analysis image-editing board, Grok Imagine Image 2.0 sits at 1,110 Elo across 7,792 blind comparisons, listed at $60 per 1,000 images. For scale, the top of that same board is O​penAI's GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst at 1,198 on a stated interval of 1,187 to 1,209, its Flare sibling at 1,177, and a tie for third between Nano Banana 2.1 and M​icrosoft's MAI-Image-2.6 at 1,148. Those gaps are wide relative to the intervals — Sunburst to G​rok is 88 Elo — but they say nothing at all about latency, and G​rok's entry carries less than half of Sunburst's sample count.

Two caveats to hold. The board lists G​rok's creator as S​paceXAI, which is a housekeeping detail worth knowing before you search for the row and fail to find it. And the rank is board-specific in a way that matters here: the same model sits fifth on the text-to-image board at 1,166 Elo, and thirteenth on editing at 1,110. If you are buying an editor, the editing row is the one you are buying, and it is the lower of the two.

The sharper version of that comes from the tier it replaces. The older grok-imagine-image-quality slug still sits on the editing board at 1,091, nineteenth place, so on editing the new tier is ahead of the old one by roughly nineteen Elo, for a $0.01-per-image premium. On text-to-image the same generational step was worth well over a hundred. x​AI shipped a much better generator and a modestly better editor, and only one of those improvements would have led a launch post.

And G​rok's independent reputation to date is uneven in a specific way: in a six-prompt, single-seed comparison against gpt-image-2 we covered previously, x​AI's model led clearly on photorealism and identity retention — correct portrait anatomy, pore-level skin detail, natural catchlights — and lost on production-critical behaviour, rendering Traditional Chinese characters when asked for Simplified in a film-poster headline, and returning a photorealistic image with only a light painterly pass when a watercolour style fusion was requested. That is one small test, not a body of evidence, and we said so at the time. But the failure it found — multilingual text compliance — is the kind that takes a localisation pipeline down, and no Elo average will ever surface it.

K​rea 3 has no equivalent record in either direction. It is four days old, has no board entry, and the only third-party signal attached to it is a customer testimonial: Pixelcut's co-founder and CEO, quoted by K​rea, saying his team ran early checkpoints in front of paying users and that lighting on product shots was the standout. Useful, unverifiable at our end, and labelled here as a partner statement.

L'écart de fonctionnalités qui compte davantage que l'écart de prix

Sur le papier, les prix sont proches : six cents contre un « à partir de 0,04 $ » qui augmente selon le niveau de qualité réellement servi. La différence ne tient pas aux cents. Elle tient à ce que chaque modèle est prêt à faire à votre image.

Grok Imagine Image 2.0 will reformat. Smart Resize invents new content to turn one image into nine aspect ratios rather than cropping, which is exactly what an ad team needs when the same hero has to run at 1:1, 9:16 and 2:1. It will also composite up to five sources into one edit. K​rea 3 will not do either, as documented — its pitch is the opposite discipline. Draw a box, describe the change, and everything outside the box stays where it was, with precision defined as the share of pixels outside the edit area left unchanged, compared at quarter resolution after alignment.

Those are complementary, not competing, and the cost of choosing wrongly is asymmetric. A marketing team that buys K​rea 3 for a reformatting workflow gets a model that is excellent at a job it was not asked to do. A catalogue team that buys Grok Imagine Image 2.0 for label-accurate product edits gets a very capable editor with no published containment metric — and possible multilingual text risk on top, per that one test.

Coût à l'échelle du catalogue, avec les deux réserves qui y sont attachées

For K​rea 3 the arithmetic is trivial and the risk is that it is the only arithmetic available. 100,000 edits at $0.06 is $6,000, and K​rea's own FAQ says the launch price is the list price, not a subsidy, and that it expects the price to fall rather than rise. That is a vendor statement about the future, so a budget built on it is a bet.

For Grok Imagine Image 2.0 the shape is different, and there is a deadline hiding in it. The model bills from $0.04 per image at the quality tier actually served, and the default when you omit the parameter is auto — which currently serves low for generation and medium for editing, so the same request can bill differently depending on which path the service picks. Pinning the tier makes the bill predictable. Meanwhile the older grok-imagine-image-quality slug, at $0.05 per image, retires on 2 November 2026 after a 60-day notice; from that date it keeps resolving but requests are served by Grok Imagine Image 2.0 at low quality. Teams that change nothing see a price drop and a silent change in output quality, which is the worst of both — unless you read the model field in your responses. That retirement schedule is x​AI's own documentation, not something anyone has independently verified.

Où se trouvent les deux, et comment les tenir

Aucun des deux modèles n'est à brancher directement dans un pipeline destiné aux clients ce mois-ci. L'un a un rang dans un classement, un slug retiré en dessous et une défaillance documentée sur du texte multilingue ; l'autre a un prix, un chronomètre et aucune preuve externe d'aucune sorte. La posture raisonnable pour les deux est l'essai derrière une solution de repli.

That is the specific thing routing buys you here, and it is worth being precise about what we do and do not cover. OrcaRouter provides one OpenAI-compatible endpoint across a few hundred models with provider list prices passed through at no markup — a vendor price cut reaches your bill the same day — plus failover that sends a provider error or rate limit to a fallback rather than into your batch. On availability: our catalogue carries x​AI's grok-imagine-image line and its model page is live, but the newest Grok Imagine Image 2.0 tier is a separate entry, so check the current model list rather than assuming the 2.0 quality mode is routable today. K​rea 3 is not routed by us at all. What the endpoint does cover is the rest of the comparison set — GPT Image 2 and the image models you would benchmark either of these against — so the test you should be running is one configuration, not three integrations.

Comment décider, étant donné que les preuves sont déséquilibrées

Si vous avez besoin aujourd’hui d’un éditeur dont la position de qualité est publique et mesurée par la foule, c’est Grok Imagine Image 2.0, et vous devez vous lancer en sachant qu’il est classé onzième plutôt que premier, que sa facture évolue avec le palier de qualité, sauf si vous l’épinglez, et que sa migration au niveau du slug a une date. Lisez le champ modèle dans vos réponses et migrez le slug de qualité en cours de retrait avant le 2 novembre 2026.

If you need flat pricing, contained edits and the shortest wall-clock time anyone in this category has published, that is K​rea 3 — with the understanding that you are the first person testing it, that its reference count is documented two ways, and that its identifier appears as K​rea 3 Beta in K​rea's own plan tables.

Le départage n’est pas le modèle. C’est de savoir lequel des deux modes de défaillance vous pouvez vous permettre : une retouche qui prend quarante secondes et vous surprend sur la localisation, ou une retouche qui revient en huit secondes et n’a jamais été jugée par personne d’autre que son auteur. Faites passer quarante de vos propres images dans les deux, et que la réponse soit la vôtre plutôt que celle de l’un ou l’autre des fournisseurs.

Pour un modèle dont les modes de défaillance ne sont pas encore documentés, la contrepartie utile est le registre de ce qui a déjà mal tourné ailleurs : les incidents d'IA documentés et les défaillances d'agents concernant les modèles de cette classe sont recensés dans l'OrcaRouter AI Incident Archive, où chaque entrée comporte ses propres sources, son niveau de gravité, son degré de confiance et son indicateur de contestation.