Krea 3 vs Grok Imagine Image 2.0: 한 모델은 Elo를, 다른 모델은 스톱워치를 가졌다

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.

그 대비의 양쪽 절반은 모두 사실이며, 어느 쪽도 다른 쪽을 상쇄하지 않는다. Elo는 군중이 라벨을 볼 수 없을 때 무엇을 선호하는지 알려주지만, 당신의 로고가 편집을 견뎌냈는지는 알려주지 못한다. 지연 시간 수치는 벤더 자체 인프라가 벤더 자체 프롬프트에서 무엇을 했는지 알려주지만, 그 모델이 얼마나 좋은지는 알려주지 못한다. 이 둘을 함께 읽는 것이 선택하는 유일하게 정직한 방법이며, 이 글의 나머지 부분이 하는 일이 바로 그것이다.

각각이 무엇인지, 공급업체의 표현 그대로

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.

• 가중치 — 둘 다 아님. 어느 쪽도 오픈 가중치가 없으며, 둘 다 호스팅 모델입니다.

열세 개의 열을 읽기

Elo를 다룰 때 흔히 빠지기 쉬운 유혹은 그 숫자를 일종의 평결로 받아들이는 것이다. 하지만 그 숫자는 의견이 갈리는 지점이 어디인지를 보여주는 지도로서 더 유용하다.

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.

가격 격차보다 더 중요한 기능 격차

서류상으로는 가격이 비슷하다: 6센트 대 실제로 제공되는 품질 등급에 따라 올라가는 "0.04달러부터". 차이는 센트에 있지 않다. 그것은 각 모델이 당신의 프레임에 기꺼이 무엇을 할 의향이 있는지에 있다.

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.

카탈로그 규모에서의 비용, 두 가지 유의 사항을 모두 포함한

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.

둘 다 어디에 놓이는지, 그리고 어떻게 잡는지

두 모델 모두 이번 달에 고객 대면 파이프라인에 직접 연결해서는 안 되는 모델입니다. 하나는 리더보드 순위가 있고, 그 아래에는 폐기된 슬러그가 있으며, 문서화된 다국어 텍스트 실패가 있습니다. 다른 하나는 가격과 스톱워치만 있을 뿐, 어떤 종류의 외부 증거도 없습니다. 두 모델 모두에 대한 합리적인 자세는 폴백 뒤에서 시험하는 것입니다.

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.

증거가 한쪽으로 치우쳐 있을 때 어떻게 결정해야 하는가

오늘 공개적으로 크라우드가 측정한 품질 순위를 가진 에디터가 필요하다면, 그것은 Grok Imagine Image 2.0입니다. 그리고 1위가 아니라 11위라는 점, 품질 등급을 고정하지 않으면 청구 금액이 품질 등급에 따라 변동한다는 점, 슬러그 수준 마이그레이션에 날짜가 정해져 있다는 점을 알고 시작해야 합니다. 응답의 모델 필드를 읽고 2026년 11월 2일 전에 지원 종료되는 품질 슬러그를 마이그레이션하세요.

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.

승부를 가르는 것은 모델이 아니다. 그것은 당신이 감당할 수 있는 두 가지 실패 유형 중 어느 쪽인가다: 40초가 걸리고 현지화에서 예상치 못한 문제를 일으키는 편집인가, 아니면 8초 만에 돌아오지만 만든 사람 외에는 아무도 평가해 본 적 없는 편집인가. 당신의 이미지 40장을 두 방식 모두에 돌려보고, 답이 어느 공급업체의 것이 아니라 당신의 것이 되게 하라.

실패 모드가 아직 문서화되지 않은 모델의 경우, 유용한 대응물은 다른 곳에서 이미 무엇이 잘못되었는지에 대한 기록입니다. 이 등급의 모델과 관련된 문서화된 AI 사고와 에이전트 실패는 the OrcaRouter AI Incident Archive에 수집되어 있으며, 각 항목에는 자체 출처, 심각도, 신뢰도 등급 및 분쟁 플래그가 함께 제공됩니다.