Krea 3 對決 Grok Imagine Image 2.0：一個模型有 Elo 評分，另一個則有碼錶

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.

那個對比的兩半都是真的，且彼此並不相互抵消。Elo 告訴你，當群眾看不見標籤時偏好什麼；它無法告訴你，你的標誌是否在編輯後倖存。延遲數字告訴你，供應商自己的基礎設施在供應商自己的提示上做了什麼；它無法告訴你，這個模型到底好不好。將它們放在一起解讀，是唯一誠實的選擇方式，而這也是本文其餘部分所做的。

每一項究竟是什麼，用供應商自己的話來說

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.

• 權重 — 兩者皆非。雙方皆無開放權重；兩者都是託管模型。

閱讀十三人的行列

談到 Elo，最誘人的做法就是把那個數字當成最終裁決。但它更有用的地方，是作為一張標示出分歧所在的地圖。

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.

比價格差距更重要的功能差距

表面上，價格很接近：六美分，對上一個會隨著實際提供的品質等級而調升的「從 $0.04 起」。差異不在那幾美分，而在於每個模型願意對你的影格做什麼。

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.

型錄規模下的成本，並附帶兩項但書

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.

兩者應置於何處，以及如何握持它們

這兩個模型，這個月都不適合直接接入面向客戶的流程。其中一個有排行榜名次、底下掛著一個已退役的 slug，還有多語言文字處理失敗的紀錄；另一個則有價格、有碼錶，卻完全沒有任種類型的外部證據。對兩者而言，合理的立場都是：先試用，並以備援機制兜底。

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.

在證據一面倒的情況下，該如何決定

如果你今天需要一款具有公開、群眾實測品質定位的編輯器，那就是 Grok Imagine Image 2.0；你應該事先知道它排名第十一，而非第一，它的帳單會隨品質層級變動，除非你將其固定，而且它的 slug 層級遷移有期限。請讀取你回應中的 model 欄位，並在 2026 年 11 月 2 日前遷移即將淘汰的品質 slug。

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.

決勝關鍵不是模型，而是這兩種失敗模式中，哪一種是你負擔得起的：一種是花上四十秒、卻在本地化上讓你措手不及的編輯；另一種是八秒就回傳、卻除了製作者之外從未經過任何人評判的編輯。用你自己的四十張圖片跑過這兩者，讓答案由你決定，而不是由任一廠商決定。

對於一個失效模式仍未被記錄的模型來說，有用的對照資料是其他地方已經出錯的紀錄：這類模型的已記錄 AI 事件與代理失效，都收錄在 OrcaRouter AI Incident Archive，其中每筆條目都附有自己的來源、嚴重程度、信心等級與爭議標記。