Z.ai's open source GLM-Image beats Google's Nano Banana Pro at complex text rendering, but not aesthetics

The two big stories of AI in 2026 so far have been the incredible rise in usage and praise for Anthropic's Claude Code and a similar huge boost in user adoption for Google's Gemini 3 AI model family released late last year — the latter of which includes Nano Banana Pro (also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image), a powerful, fast, and flexible image generation model that renders complex, text-heavy infographics quickly and accurately, making it an excellent fit for enterprise use (think: collateral, trainings, onboarding, stationary, etc).But of course, both of those are proprietary offerings. And yet, open source rivals have not been far behind. This week, we got a new open source alternative to Nano Banana Pro in the category of precise, text-heavy image generators: GLM-Image, a new 16-billion pa