ByteDance and Google have both released genuinely capable image generators this year. But Seedream 5.0 Lite and Nano Banana 2 are built around very different design priorities. Seedream bets on Chain of Thought visual reasoning and aggressive cost efficiency. Nano Banana 2 bets on factual grounding, structural precision, and a wide resolution range. The interesting question isn’t which one is technically “better.” It’s whether those architectural differences show up in ways that actually change what you’d reach for in practice. I ran both models through six text-to-image themes and four image-to-image challenges, with identical prompts and reference images throughout. The three comparisons below are the ones that reveal the clearest, most practical differences between them. At a Glance The two models come from different companies and reflect genuinely different engineering priorities. Seedream 5.0 Lite is built by ByteDance.…