GPT Image 2 vs Midjourney, DALL-E 3 & Nano Banana Pro

GPT Image 2 is built around legible in-image text and renders headlines, signs and UI copy with near-perfect character accuracy across Latin and non-Latin scripts, and tends to beat Midjourney on typography and layout. Nano Banana Pro is also very strong and handles everything from short taglines to full paragraphs. Midjourney v7 is much improved for short phrases but still worth checking, and DALL-E 3 renders simple labels legibly while garbling complex or multi-line text.

This is where GPT Image 2 does not come first: in many side-by-side tests Google's Nano Banana Pro is preferred for photorealistic detail and lighting, and GPT Image 2 trails it here. Midjourney produces beautiful images but leans stylized rather than literally photographic, and DALL-E 3 now looks dated next to the other three.

GPT Image 2 adds an autoregressive 'thinking' step before drawing, so it follows long, structured prompts and complex instructions reliably. DALL-E 3 was historically one of the best at multi-part instructions and is still solid here, while Midjourney favors short prompts and its own aesthetic interpretation over literal instruction-following.

Both lead the field. Nano Banana Pro keeps up to 5 people and 14 objects consistent across scenes and can blend up to 14 reference images; GPT Image 2 generates up to 8 coherent images per prompt with characters and objects held consistent across the set. Midjourney and DALL-E 3 are weaker for repeatable characters.

GPT Image 2 renders text across five non-Latin scripts — including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Bengali — in a single pass, which makes it strong for CJK and localized designs. Nano Banana Pro also renders and even translates multilingual text well. Midjourney and DALL-E 3 are unreliable outside Latin scripts.

For subjective beauty — cinematic lighting, illustration, concept art, editorial and brand mood work — Midjourney remains the gold standard, with a polished visual signature that is hard to replicate. GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro are more literal and accurate: great for production, less distinctive as pure art.

Nano Banana Pro is typically the fastest and most cost-efficient of the four. GPT Image 2's Thinking mode can add noticeable latency, and its API is priced per image by quality. Midjourney is subscription-based (from about $10/month) and slower at v7. Check each provider's current pricing before deciding.