Seedream 4 Challenges Nano Banana

Seedream 4 can generate images with up to 4K resolution, supports multi-reference image input, works across multiple aspect ratios, and cheaper than Nano Banana.

In the past couple of days, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash image model, also known as Nano Banana, has been going viral in the AI community. People are impressed by how versatile it is, being able to both generate and edit images while keeping the cost low and the quality high. It even topped the LMArena image model ranking with a score of 1,362, which shows just how strong its reception has been.

Today, Nano Banana is challenged by Seedream 4, a new image model from Bytedance.

Seedream 4 can generate images with up to 4K resolution, supports up to six image references, and works across multiple aspect ratios. This makes the model superior to Nano Banana, which can only generate square photos at 1080p resolution. More importantly, Seedream 4 is cheaper to run.

In this article, I will discuss Seedream 4 in detail and compare it against nano banana to see whether it’s a good enough replacement.

Let’s get started.

What’s New In Seedream 4?

This is the latest iteration of the image model from ByteDance. Seedream 4 integrates image generation and image editing capabilities into a single, unified architecture.

Seedream 4. Image from Seedream website

This allows it to flexibly handle complex multimodal tasks, including knowledge-based generation, complex reasoning, and reference consistency.

With much faster inference speed than its predecessor, the model can produce stunning, high-definition images at up to 4K resolution.

In comparison with other models like Google’s Gemini 2.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-Image-1, Seedream 4.0 has shown strong performance across key dimensions such as prompt adherence, alignment, and aesthetics.

In text-to-image tasks, it consistently produced high-quality outputs, scoring well for both prompt following and text rendering while also delivering visually pleasing results.

For single-image editing, the model maintained a good balance between staying faithful to the prompt and preserving alignment with the source image.

Its overall effectiveness was further validated by reaching the top spot in the internal Elo evaluation, underscoring its capability as one of the most reliable models available today.

How To Use Seedream 4?

Since its launch, Seedream 4 has already been integrated into almost all of the popular image generator platforms. To give you a clear idea of how it works, I’ll walk through a simple example using Flux Labs AI.