Nano Banana vs FLUX vs Seedream: Pick by Scene, Not by Rank

TL;DR: None of them is better for every faceless video, and we publish no benchmark. All three make vertical 9:16 stills. Their cheapest tiers cost about 1.4 to 3.4 cents an image, and FLUX also ships open weights. Pick by running five consecutive scenes of your own script through two of them.

Search for Nano Banana vs FLUX vs Seedream and you will find plenty of posts that end by naming a winner. This one does not. We publish no benchmark of image models, so you will find no success rates, timings or ranking of ours below.

A winner would not answer the question creators ask anyway. One of them put it this way on r/aitubers(opens in new tab), in a thread about AI video: "most tools can generate something decent. But very few outputs feel cinematic and consistent across a full project. Is it the tool? The prompting? The editing layer?"

A decent picture is not the hard part. A faceless Short needs a run of stills that look like one video, and the leaderboard we cite below does not score that.

So this post sticks to what can be checked: the models each vendor sells today, the price of one image on the vendor's own list, who owns the result, the limits the vendors document, and a short test for your own scenes.

We read every page on October 9, 2026.

What happened to FLUX.1, Seedream 3.0 and the first Nano Banana?

All three have been superseded. In March 2026 this post compared FLUX.1, Seedream 3.0 and Nano Banana. Seven months later, none of them is its vendor's current model.

• FLUX.1: Black Forest Labs files it under "FLUX.1 Models (Previous Generation)" on its price list(opens in new tab). FLUX 3 Image and FLUX.2 come before it.
• Seedream 3.0: it is not on BytePlus's image price list(opens in new tab), which starts at Seedream 4.0 and ends at 5.0 Pro.
• Nano Banana: Google's pricing page(opens in new tab) marks the first one, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, as deprecated.

The March version also called Nano Banana "Google's Imagen 3 model". That was wrong. Imagen 3 was a separate model, and Google's deprecations page(opens in new tab) gives its shutdown date as November 10, 2025. The image generation guide(opens in new tab) now says: "Imagen is shut down and no longer available through the Gemini API."

The March version also reported a two-week test with success rates; there is no record of that test, and those figures are removed.

A reader who picked from that post this autumn chose between two models their vendors had moved past and a third we had misnamed. We publish no benchmark. Each price below carries its date, and the post ends on a test you can repeat when the names change again.

Which image models do the vendors sell in October 2026?

Each family now sells several tiers. The names below are the vendors' own.

The wording comes from the FLUX price list(opens in new tab), the Seedream 5.0 tutorial(opens in new tab), Google's image generation guide(opens in new tab) and OpenAI's image generation guide(opens in new tab). ByteDance sells API access through its cloud platform, BytePlus.

GPT Image is not in this post's title. It is in this table because it sits on the same shortlists, and because our own product uses it (more on that below).

Nano Banana 2.1 is three days old as we write: Google's deprecations page gives its release date as October 6, 2026. Expect its price and limits to move, and check the page before you budget.

What does one image cost?

For the three families in the title, between 1.4 and 13.4 cents at roughly 1K size. These are list prices for the vendors' own APIs, read on October 9, 2026.

Sources: Black Forest Labs pricing(opens in new tab), BytePlus model pricing(opens in new tab) and Gemini API pricing(opens in new tab). OpenAI bills by token, at $30 per million image output tokens. The three GPT Image figures are what the calculator in its image generation guide(opens in new tab) estimates for the output of a 1024 × 1024 image, before input tokens.

Inside one family the tier moves the price more than the family does. Nano Banana Pro costs four times as much as Nano Banana 2 Lite. FLUX.2 [max] costs five times as much as [klein] 4B. The cheapest tiers of the three families sit within a factor of 2.4 of each other.

For a Short, price rarely decides. Say a video uses 15 stills. At $0.0336 each that is about 50 cents, and at $0.134 about two dollars. What a list price cannot tell you is how many pictures you will throw away, and you only learn that by testing.

The March version described a large free tier on Google's API. Today the same pricing page lists the free tier as "Not available" for every Nano Banana model. Running a model for free now means open weights: FLUX.2 [klein] 4B is published under Apache 2.0 and, by the FLUX.2 overview(opens in new tab), runs on consumer GPUs with about 13GB of VRAM.

Can you use the images in monetized videos?

None of the four vendors claims ownership of what you generate through its API, by the terms as we read them on October 9, 2026. Only Black Forest Labs says "commercial purposes" in so many words. We are not lawyers, and an app that resells these models has terms of its own.

• Black Forest Labs: "we claim no ownership rights in and to your Output", and you "may use Outputs for your or their own personal or commercial purposes" (developer terms(opens in new tab)).
• BytePlus: "you own the Output generated in response to your Input, and BytePlus does not claim ownership of such Output" (AI services terms(opens in new tab)).
• Google: "Google won't claim ownership over that content" (Gemini API terms(opens in new tab)).
• OpenAI: the customer "owns all Output" (services agreement(opens in new tab)).

Open weights are a separate case. FLUX.2 [klein] 9B is released under the FLUX Non-Commercial License, and [dev] is listed as non-commercial. Black Forest Labs sells separate licences for running them on your own hardware, on its pricing page(opens in new tab). Read that licence before you use either for a channel that earns.

Owning a picture is not the same as holding a copyright on it. BytePlus says in the same terms that it "does not represent or warrant that any Output will be original, unique, protectable, registrable, or non-infringing."

What limits will a Shorts creator hit?

Four: the vertical frame, words inside the picture, keeping a character the same, and labels. The vendors document the first three themselves.

Vertical 9:16

All four can make a 9:16 still, but not all by default.

• FLUX 3 Image: 9:16 is one of fifteen aspect ratios in its docs(opens in new tab).
• Seedream 5.0 Pro and Flash: the tutorial lists 9:16 at 800 × 1424, 1152 × 2048 and 1584 × 2816, and notes that 1.5K "has the same price as 1K".
• Nano Banana 2 Lite: 9:16 is one of ten ratios, and the price list shows 1K output only.
• GPT Image 2.5: the recommended portrait size is 1024 × 1536, which is 2:3. A true 9:16 has to be asked for as a custom size.

Words inside the picture

Two vendors print a caution themselves. OpenAI lists text rendering under limitations: "the model can still struggle with precise text placement and clarity." Google's guide advises a workaround: "Gemini works best if you first generate the text and then ask for an image with the text."

Black Forest Labs and ByteDance lead with text as a strength. Black Forest Labs calls FLUX.2 [flex] "Specialized for typography". ByteDance says Seedream 5.0 Pro "Can generate text-rich images" on its model page(opens in new tab). Those are claims, and only your own sign or title card can test them.

The same character in every still

This comes down to reference images, and the tiers differ more than the families.

• FLUX: FLUX 3 Image takes 1 to 10 reference images at no extra charge. FLUX.2 [klein] takes up to 4.
• Seedream 5.0 Pro: the first reference image is free, and each one after it costs $0.003.
• Nano Banana: 2.1 supports "character resemblance of up to 4 characters". Google describes 2 Lite as "Not optimized for multiple reference inputs or multi-turn sequential editing."
• GPT Image: OpenAI's own limitations list says the model "may occasionally struggle to maintain visual consistency for recurring characters or brand elements across multiple generations."

Google calls 2 Lite its fastest and cheapest image model, and it is also the one Google steers away from reference work. If your channel has a recurring character, check that line before you check the price.

Labels and watermarks

Google states that "All generated images include a SynthID watermark." Seedream's API has a watermark switch you set yourself.

On YouTube, the rule turns on realism. Creators must disclose AI content that "Generates a realistic scene that didn't actually occur", and need not disclose content that is clearly unrealistic, by YouTube's disclosure policy(opens in new tab). The same page says disclosing "won't limit a video's audience or impact its eligibility to earn money." So a photoreal look brings the disclosure with it, and a drawn look usually does not.

What does the public leaderboard measure?

Single pictures, voted on in pairs. The Artificial Analysis text-to-image leaderboard(opens in new tab) "Ranks image models on generating an image from a text prompt, by Elo from pairwise human preference votes." It is an independent benchmark, and it is not ours.

When we read it on October 9, 2026, it showed:

• GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Flare first and second, at 1198 and 1191, both at the "max" quality setting.
• Nano Banana 2.1 fourth, at 1160.
• Nano Banana 2 Lite fourteenth, at 1095.
• Seedream 5.0 Pro sixteenth, at 1081.
• FLUX.2 [flex] twenty-third, at 1027, the highest FLUX entry. FLUX 3 Image was not on the board.

The top entries cost about 21 cents an image at the setting that was ranked ($210.7 per 1,000 images in the board's own price column). Nano Banana 2.1, 38 points below the top entry, costs about a sixth of that.

Use the board to build a shortlist, not to pick. A vote on one picture cannot see the run. It does not know your niche, your 9:16 crop, or whether scene three looks like it belongs with scene two.

How do you choose between them for your own scenes?

Run five scenes in a row through two models and judge the strip. Ten test images cost $1.34 at the highest price in the table above, and a few cents at the lowest.

1. Take five consecutive scenes from a real script. Choose the stretch that is hardest to picture: a face up close, hands, a dark room, a named place.
2. Write one style sentence and paste it into all five prompts. Pick two models from different families in the table above, and ask for 9:16 on both.
3. Lay the five stills side by side, in order. Look at the set before you look at any one picture. Does the light hold? Does the person in scene four match scene one?
4. Count the redos. Your real price per kept image is the list price times the images you made, divided by the images you kept.
5. Note what was refused. If your niche is dark, such as horror or true crime, this step matters most. OpenAI filters every prompt and image, with a moderation setting of auto or low. FLUX 3 Image has a safety_tolerance from 0 to 4. Black Forest Labs (for FLUX 3 Image) and BytePlus both state that moderated outputs are not billed.
6. Keep the model whose strip you would publish with fewer redos. If the two tie, take the cheaper one.

Then pick by the kind of scene you make most. A channel with one recurring character should weigh the reference-image line first. A channel that puts signs or headlines in frame should test those exact words. A creator in the r/aitubers thread made a third case: "'real life' generations tend to look very artificial so you should lean into styles that look like they're made in an animator."

How many stills you need is a separate question. It follows the script, and we cover it in how often to cut a Short.

Passing this test gets one Short to hold together. Keeping thirty uploads in the same look is the next problem, and the link at the end is about that.

All of this assumes you call the models yourself. If you would rather not touch an API, the stills come inside a video tool, and the choice becomes which tool. We compare those in the best faceless video tools of 2026.

What does ViralFaceless use?

Two of the models above. ViralFaceless is our tool. It turns a script into a vertical 9:16 video of up to 60 seconds, or 30 on the Free plan, and it has two image tiers.

• Standard: 2 credits a scene, on every plan. It uses Google's Nano Banana 2 Lite by default.
• Pro: 6 credits a scene, on paid plans. It uses OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Flare by default.

Both have been in place since the release of October 1, 2026, and the app prints the tier and the model name where you create a video. We publish no benchmark of the two against each other, or against FLUX and Seedream. Read this as a fact about the product, not as a recommendation.

FAQ

Which is better for faceless YouTube videos: Nano Banana, FLUX or Seedream?

None is better for every channel. All three make 9:16 stills, and none of the three vendors claims ownership of what you generate through its API. They differ in price per tier, in how they take reference images, and in how the vendor describes text rendering. Test five consecutive scenes of your own on two of them.

Is Nano Banana the same as Imagen?

No. Nano Banana is Google's name for the image models in the Gemini family, such as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (Nano Banana 2 Lite). Imagen was a separate line. Google's image generation guide says Imagen "is shut down and no longer available through the Gemini API."

Is there a free way to use these models?

Not through Google's API: its pricing page lists the free tier as "Not available" for the Nano Banana models. FLUX.2 [klein] 4B has open weights under Apache 2.0, so you can run it on your own GPU. For what a tool plan adds up to over a month, see what a month of faceless video costs.

Do you have to label AI images on YouTube?

Only when they look real. YouTube requires disclosure for AI content that "Generates a realistic scene that didn't actually occur." Clearly unrealistic content, such as animation, needs no disclosure. YouTube says the label does not limit a video's audience or its eligibility to earn.

What to do in the next ten minutes

Open your last script and mark the five scenes in a row that are hardest to picture. Write the one style sentence you will paste into all five prompts.

That is your test set. It works on whichever model you try first, and on the one that replaces it.