In the past few weeks, nearly every major AI lab has released an image editing model. The first was FLUX.1 Kontext from Black Forest Labs in May, which stood out for style transformations and simple image edits. Since then, we’ve seen a wave of models, each strong in its own way.
With so many options, it can be hard to figure out which one works best for your needs. In this post, we’re putting them head to head and evaluating each across a range of image editing tasks. By the end, you should have a clear sense of which one fits your workflow.
To start, here’s an overview of the cost and average inference time for each model we’re evaluating.
ModelLabPrice per ImageInference TimeFLUX.1 Kontext [dev]Black Forest Labs$0.0251.7 secondsFLUX.1 Kontext [pro]Black Forest Labs$0.044.4 secondsFLUX.1 Kontext [max]Black Forest Labs$0.084.9 secondsQwen Image EditAlibaba$0.032.9 secondsQwen Image Edit PlusAlibaba$0.0316 secondsNano BananaGoogle$0.03910 secondsSeedEdit 3.0ByteDance$0.0313 secondsSeedream 4ByteDance$0.0314 secondsGPT Image 1OpenAI$0.01-$0.2540 seconds
The cheapest is GPT-image-1 from OpenAI which starts $0.01 per image, but it has the longest generation time (around 40 seconds). FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] (optimized by Pruna AI) is the fastest at 1.9s per generation and is also one of the cheaper options, but there is, of course, a trade off with image editing quality for hyper-optimized models.
