Google Nano Banana 2.1 vs OpenAI o3
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Nano Banana 2.1 is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- o3 accepts longer prompts: 200K vs 66K tokens.
- Nano Banana 2.1 is the newer model (released 2026-10-06).
| Nano Banana 2.1 | o3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | OpenAI | |
| Released | 2026-10-06 | 2025-04-16 |
| Input / 1M | $1.50 | $2.00 |
| Output / 1M | $7.50 | $8.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.50 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $3.00 | $3.50 |
| Context | 66K | 200K |
| Max output | 59K | 100K |
| Accepts | text, image | text, image, file |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $7.50 | $8.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.86% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | Operational |
Cost calculator
Nano Banana 2.1
$203 per month$6.75 per day
o3
$240 per month$8.00 per day
Nano Banana 2.1 saves $37.50 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Nano Banana 2.1 with