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Nano Banana Pro vs Midjourney: which to pay for
One sells pictures by the credit, the other sells GPU time by the month. Where Midjourney is plainly better, where Nano Banana Pro is, and what happened when we carried one picture across.
Nano Banana Pro is Google's image model, sold on aikizi at 8 credits a picture (about 3.7 cents on the $20 plan). Midjourney is a subscription to GPU time, from $10 to $120 a month. Pick Nano Banana Pro when the picture needs legible text in it, when you want a per-picture price, or when you want a written prompt back out of a picture. Pick Midjourney when you want its look, its Editor, or personalization trained on your own taste.
The shapes of the two things
| Nano Banana Pro on aikizi | Midjourney | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Credits: 8 / 16 / 24 for 1K / 2K / 4K | Fast-GPU hours: 3.3 to 60 a month by tier |
| Entry price | $8/mo (180 credits) or $20 (540) | $10/mo Basic, $30 Standard, $60 Pro, $120 Mega |
| Unlimited option | No | Yes — relax mode, Standard and up |
| Per-picture price | Published and fixed | Not published; GPU time, not images |
| References in one prompt | 3 on Basic, 10 on Pro, each with a named role | Up to 4, via the V8 Edit Model |
| Editing an existing image | Regenerate with references | The Editor: brush inpainting, outpainting, instruction edits |
| Text inside the picture | What the model is built and marketed for | Improving, not its strength |
| Picture to prompt | Decode, 3 credits, seven tabs and a prompt | Describe, roughly |
Where Midjourney is straightforwardly better
Three places, and pretending otherwise would not help you.
- The Editor. Since the V8 Edit Model entered public testing on 27 August 2026, Midjourney edits an existing image from written instructions, with an erase brush, a restore brush and a smart-select mask. There is no equivalent here; on aikizi you re-generate with references instead.
- Personalization. Midjourney can learn your own ranking preferences and apply them to everything you make. aikizi has no such thing — consistency here comes from references you attach each time, not from a stored profile.
- Volume at a flat price. Relax mode on Standard and above is unlimited. Credits are not. If you generate hundreds of pictures a month and do not care about waiting, a flat subscription simply wins.
Where Nano Banana Pro wins
- Text in the image. Google builds and markets this model for correctly rendered, legible text directly in the picture, in several languages. If your work has signs, labels, posters or titles in it, this is the difference that decides.
- Knowing what a picture cost. 8 credits is 8 credits. A GPU-hour budget does not tell you what one picture cost you.
- Getting a prompt back out. A decode reads any picture — including a Midjourney one — into seven tabs: palette with hex codes, a layered style DNA, seven style tokens, and a generation prompt you can run anywhere. 3 credits.
- Named reference roles. Each attached image can be told what it is — character, style, object, scene, pose, lighting — and the role writes an explicit sentence into the prompt.
What crossing over actually looks like
We took a Midjourney portrait, decoded it for 3 credits, and ran its own prompt back through Nano Banana Pro with the Midjourney picture attached as a style reference.
Every word is correct and legible, including the punctuation, and the second line is correctly smaller. That is the capability Google builds this model for and the clearest reason to choose it over Midjourney for commercial work — signage, packaging, posters, book covers, anything with real words in it.
Two honest marks against it. It broke the first line after the em dash, so the sign reads "PLATFORM 3–" as though hyphenated; a line-break instruction would have fixed that. And we asked for no other text in frame, yet the blurred platform behind carries two more signs. Both are prompt problems rather than rendering problems — but you will still be checking every character.
On the rest of the comparison, crossing a Midjourney picture into Nano Banana Pro keeps palette, medium and subject and loses the line character; the full account is in Midjourney to aikizi.
One correction worth having
Much of what is written about Midjourney is a year stale. As of September 2026: V8.2 has been the default since 24 July 2026 and is an image-quality and Personalization update, not an edit model. The Edit Model for V8 is separate, in public testing since 27 August. --cref no longer applies to V8 — it sits in the legacy documentation, replaced by Omni Reference in V7 and by the Edit Model in V8 — and --oref is unsupported on V8.1 and V8.2. Style reference and style weight still work.
FAQ
Is Nano Banana Pro better than Midjourney?
For legible text inside a picture, for a known per-picture price, and for turning a picture back into a prompt, yes. For editing an existing image, for personalization, and for high volume at a flat price, Midjourney wins. They are different shapes of product, not competing versions of one.
Which is cheaper?
Nano Banana Pro has a published per-picture price — 8 credits at 1K, about 3.7 cents on the $20 plan. Midjourney sells GPU hours from $10 to $120 a month with unlimited relax generation above the entry tier, so at high volume it is cheaper and at low volume it is not.
Can I use my Midjourney images on aikizi?
Yes. Decode one for 3 credits and you get its palette with hex codes, a layered style DNA and a generation prompt; attach the picture itself as a style reference to carry the look into a new generation.
Does Midjourney still have --cref?
Not for V8. Character Reference is in Midjourney's legacy documentation — compatible with version 6, replaced by Omni Reference in V7 and by the Edit Model in V8. Style reference and style weight do still work on V8.1 and V8.2.
Which one handles text in images?
Nano Banana Pro. Google builds and markets it specifically for correctly rendered, legible text directly in the image, across languages.
The cheapest way to judge it is to decode a picture you already made elsewhere: drop one into the Studio for 3 credits and read what comes back. The model comparison against the cheaper Nano Banana 2 is here.