Midjourney vs Nano Banana: features, prices and limits

Midjourney vs Nano Banana comes down to how you work. Midjourney is a subscription image service with its own web app and a version 8.2 model. Nano Banana is Google's name for its Gemini image models, which you reach through the Gemini app or pay for per image in the API. This comparison rests on the products' own docs and changelogs, as of November 2, 2026.

One gap first. Midjourney's plan and pricing pages returned an access error (HTTP 403) when we tried to read them, so this article gives no Midjourney subscription prices. Check Midjourney's plans page before you buy. Google's prices below come from its Gemini API pricing page.

Midjourney and Nano Banana side by side

What Midjourney offers

Midjourney's update log shows a fast-moving product. Its changelog for the week of October 7 lists version 8.2 in standard and edit variants, and Draft mode on versions 8.1 and 8.2, which always returns a 24-image grid. It also lists shared folders, moodboards, custom styles with Live Style Previews, and video with Extend and Loop.

The newest addition is Thinking mode. Midjourney says that in its own tests it improves prompt accuracy, typography and coherence. It works by rerunning a version 8.2 job after checking the image for missed details such as wrong objects, layout, anatomy or text. It is in testing on the Alpha site, and Midjourney has not said it is generally available.

Privacy matters here. The changelog notes that sharing a folder does not change privacy: images that are not made in stealth mode may still appear on Explore and profiles.

What Nano Banana offers

Google's Gemini image page lists three models. Nano Banana Pro is built on Gemini 3 and aimed at precise creation and editing. Nano Banana 2 is the Gemini 3.1 Flash Image model, which Google describes as pro-level quality at Flash speed. Nano Banana 2 Lite is the cheapest and fastest. Google's image generation docs also use the name Nano Banana 2.1 for a related model.

According to those docs, the models take up to 14 reference images in total, render text for infographics and menus, output at 1K, 2K and 4K (Lite supports 1K only), and add a SynthID watermark to every image. They reason before rendering, and thinking cannot be turned off in the API. Search grounding lets an image reflect real-time data such as weather.

What Nano Banana costs

Prices as of November 2, 2026, for the Gemini API, per image at the Standard tier:

Batch and Flex tiers cost half as much on both models. The pricing page lists no free tier for image output. It also says Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is deprecated and will shut down on March 15, 2027. We did not find per-image prices for Nano Banana 2 on the pages we read.

The API is only one route. The Gemini app and Google Pics are also listed as places to use the models, and their plan limits are not covered here.

Which one to pick

If you want a dedicated image workspace with styles, moodboards, folders and video, Midjourney is built for that. If you want to pay per image, generate from code, feed in many reference images or get legible text and a watermark you can verify, Nano Banana fits better.

Neither company has published a head-to-head benchmark, and we have not run the same prompts through both. Treat any claim of one beating the other as unproven until a test with shared prompts shows it. Midjourney's pricing pages are the thing to check next.