Seedream 4.5 just launched today, #2 in lmarena, a cheaper alternative to Nano Banana Pro?

Seedream 4.5 was released today, so I spent some time testing it side-by-side with Nano Banana Pro.

A lot of people are saying it’s clearly worse than Nano, but from my testing, in most real-world use cases, the results are actually much closer than I expected.

It’s not perfect, but it definitely holds up in many practical scenarios.

So far, I’ve found it performs especially well in these types of use cases:

  • Social media posts
  • Infographics / educational visuals
  • YouTube thumbnails
  • Posters / flyers

What really stands out is the pricing:

Seedream is $0.04 per image, so you can generate about 3 images for the cost of 1 Nano image. For anyone generating at scale, that’s a big deal.

I manually tested and organized 100+ real generation cases into categories just to better understand where it works best and where it still falls short.

https://preview.redd.it/us78y3t06e6g1.png?width=2940&format=png&auto=webp&s=a12f635827d620bfd8b5cf250eefd0ffc0618155

If anyone’s curious, I collected everything here:

https://youmind.com/seedream-4-dot-5-prompts

Genuinely curious to hear from others:

  • Has anyone else tested Seedream 4.5 yet?
  • In which use cases do you think it really holds up vs Nano?

Leave a Reply