Best image generation API: how to choose without a quality benchmark

Nobody can answer “best” for you, and a page that claims to is guessing. Output quality is subjective, prompt-dependent, and changes with every model release. What can be compared is everything else.

Model	Credits per image	Batch	Resolution
Flux	5	up to 4	480p, 720p, 1080p
Nano Banana	4	up to 4	480p, 720p, 1080p
Ideogram	6	up to 4	480p, 720p, 1080p

A decision procedure that does not need a quality score

1. Does your output contain text that must be readable? Logos, posters, typography. That is a capability question, not a quality one — and it eliminates most models immediately. Ideogram v3 is the one built for it.

2. Are you iterating conversationally or generating one-shot? Nano Banana is positioned for multi-turn editing with character and scene consistency. If your flow is “generate, then refine, then refine again”, that is a different requirement from “generate 1,000 variants”.

3. What does your volume cost? The spread across these three is 1.5× per image. At 10,000 images that is $399.50 versus $599.25 — real, but smaller than most people expect. Run your own numbers in the AI API cost comparison tool.

4. Only then, test output. With the field narrowed to one or two, generate the same prompts on both and judge. That is the only step that answers “best”, and it is yours to run — which is why they all sit behind one key and one request shape.

What this page refuses to do

Rank them by output quality. We have not measured it, and repeating a vendor’s own claim is not a measurement. Everything above is verifiable from the schemas and the pricing functions.

Models covered on this page

• FLUX Pro
• Nano Banana
• Ideogram v3