Leonardo AI vs Gemini Image (Nano Banana): pricing, features and which to choose

Leonardo AI is a cloud platform operated by Leonardo Interactive Pty Ltd, a Canva brand. Canva announced its acquisition on July 30, 2024, and said Leonardo would continue operating its web platform independently. Canva described a 120-person research, engineering, and design team and more than 19 million Leonardo users at the time. The service targets individual creators, businesses, and developers. Its product surface includes image and video generation, realtime canvas tools, background removal, upscaling, collections, personal model training, and developer access through an API. Leonardo is hosted rather than downloadable or self-hosted, and its catalog combines Leonardo models with selected third-party services. This breadth supports experimentation, while the hosted design leaves infrastructure, model deployment, and operational maintenance with Leonardo rather than the user or development team.

A normal browser workflow begins with a prompt, reference image, or selected model. Users can adjust generation settings, apply presets, edit results in canvas tools, remove backgrounds, upscale outputs, or create video from text and images. Paid plans add private generations, third-party model access, personal model training, rollover token banks, top-up tokens, and higher concurrent-generation limits. Leonardo says users can train personal models from a small collection, typically 10 to 20 images. Developers can call image and video generation, image-to-image, image-to-video, upscaling, background removal, custom presets, and fine-tuning through REST API access. API users can monitor request costs and configure automatic credit top-ups. The tradeoff is workflow flexibility versus operational complexity, because different features, models, and processing tasks draw from usage balances differently.

Leonardo's token pricing makes usage difficult to compare across models because token cost changes with computational demand, and relaxed unlimited generation applies only to named models at lower queue priority. Free users receive commercial-use permission, but Leonardo owns free-tier outputs and may use public content to improve services and train models. Paid subscribers receive ownership of generated content under the terms. Midjourney is the closer choice for dedicated prompt-driven image work, Adobe Firefly for Adobe-centered workflows, and Recraft for editable design graphics. Pick Leonardo if model choice, personal training, image and video tools, and one developer API matter more than a predictable per-output price. The central tradeoff is breadth and integration against variable cost, plan-specific restrictions, and the need to understand privacy and ownership differences before production use.

Gemini Image is Google’s hosted image generation and editing capability, available in the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and Vertex AI. Google introduced the original Nano Banana in 2025 as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, then introduced Nano Banana Pro on November 20, 2025. The current Gemini image page identifies Nano Banana 2.1 as the advanced consumer model, while Google’s developer documentation lists Nano Banana 2.1, Nano Banana 2 Lite, Nano Banana 2, Nano Banana Pro, and the original Nano Banana. Google does not publish a separate employee count or funding figure for this product. It is a managed service, not an isolated open model or self-hosted package.

The workflow is conversational. In Gemini, select Create images, write a prompt, or upload an image, then request changes in follow-up turns. Google highlights character consistency, reference-style transfer, photo combination, localized edits, camera and lighting changes, aspect-ratio changes, and text in multiple languages. The API accepts text and image content through the Interactions API, allowing applications to generate, edit, and iterate on images. Nano Banana Pro supports up to 14 input images and can preserve the resemblance of up to five people, according to Google’s launch material. Google embeds SynthID in generated images, and free and Google AI Pro outputs also receive a visible AI watermark.

Nano Banana has fewer production-management features than Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, or Freepik AI. Google exposes changing consumer quotas rather than a published unlimited-generation plan, model names differ between the Gemini app and developer products, and the API requires developers to handle their own application workflow. Adobe Firefly offers a broader Adobe-centered production workflow, Midjourney focuses on image creation through its own subscription service, and Freepik combines generation with stock assets and other media tools. Choose Nano Banana for conversational editing, reference composition, readable image text, Google Search grounding, or Google API access. Choose a competitor when asset libraries, team production controls, or a dedicated creative workspace matter more.