Creator MAX vs the other Nano Banana plugins.

• You want Nano Banana inpainting inside Photoshop, with your own Google key, and nothing else: buy the $9 Nano Banana Generative Fill from Medicraft. It does that job, it has done it since 2025, and it runs on Photoshop versions Creator MAX refuses.
• You want several model families in one panel and you are happy for a vendor to meter your generations: Astria's Nano Banana Pro 2 is $9 and carries Seedream and GPT Image alongside Gemini.
• You generate at volume, need the dollar cost of each generation attached to it, and want the request to go straight from your machine to the provider with nobody in between: that is what Creator MAX is for, and it is why it costs $49.99 instead of $9.

The rest of this page is the evidence for those three lines.

There are three real UXP panels that put Nano Banana inside Photoshop, and then there is a separate category of things marketed as plugins that are not panels at all.

• Nano Banana Generative Fill, by Medicraft. $9 once, sold on aescripts + aeplugins and on the Adobe Creative Cloud Marketplace. Version 2.3.0, last updated 3 July 2026.
• Nano Banana Pro 2, by Astria. $9 once, sold from Astria's own site. Version 2.0.43.
• Creator MAX, by us. $49.99 once, sold on the Adobe Creative Cloud Marketplace and on aescripts + aeplugins. Version 2.2.0, last updated 25 September 2026. Everything about it is on its own page.
• Photoshop scripts sold from single-page sites. These are .jsx files you drop into the Photoshop scripts folder, not panels: no docked UI, no selection-aware inpainting in the Photoshop sense, and no update channel. We are not quoting prices for them because we could not open their pages to verify anything on 26 September, and we are not going to repeat a number we did not read ourselves.

This is the one most people mean by "the cheap Nano Banana plugin", and it is a real piece of software with a real user base, not a throwaway. What it carries, from its Adobe Marketplace listing:

• Four Google models: Nano Banana, Nano Banana Pro, Nano Banana 2 and, since 2 July 2026, Nano Banana 2 Lite. All Google, no OpenAI and no xAI.
• Your own Gemini key, pasted into the panel. Google bills you directly, same as with us.
• Additional reference images, insert as a new layer or modify the original, and a helper that feathers the generated layer's edges so it blends.
• An editable, importable and exportable library of prepared prompts, plus a history of the last 20 prompts you used.
• Generations recordable as Photoshop actions, on Photoshop 25 and above.
• Photoshop 24.2 (2023) and above. That is the one place where it plainly beats us: Creator MAX needs Photoshop 2025 (26.0).

Two things are worth saying that do not help us. First, it does the headline job. Second, its listing also publishes a free trial on aescripts, so it can be run in your own Photoshop before it is paid for, exactly as ours can.

Astria's is the multi-model one, and the model list is genuinely broad for the price. From Astria's own plugin page:

• Nano Banana 2, Seedream 5.0 Pro, Muse Image, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and GPT Image 2.5 Flare, selected per edit.
• Photoshop 2025 (version 26) or later, macOS and Windows, delivered as a CCX file that installs in a click.
• Billing runs through an Astria key by default: generations are billed per image against a balance you top up, with no subscription. You can instead paste a Google AI Studio key, and then Gemini calls run on your own Google quota.
• Refunds: Astria's own answer is that "All sales are final because the plugin is delivered as a downloadable CCX file."

The billing line is the real difference from both other panels, and it cuts both ways. A single Astria key covering five model families is genuinely less setup than three provider accounts. It also means that on the default route your prompts and images pass through Astria's infrastructure and Astria decides the per-image rate, rather than Google, OpenAI or xAI billing you at a published one.

• Price. Creator MAX $49.99 once, all future updates included. Medicraft $9 once. Astria $9 once.
• Models. Creator MAX: ten, across Google, OpenAI and xAI, switchable per generation. Medicraft: four, all Google. Astria: five, across Google, ByteDance's Seedream, Muse and OpenAI. Nobody but us carries xAI.
• Whose key. Creator MAX: yours, for each provider, with no Bielfor server in the request path. Medicraft: yours, Gemini only. Astria: an Astria key by default, or your Google key for Gemini calls.
• Cost visibility. Creator MAX: the dollar cost of each generation is attached to it in history, plus a spend dashboard for today, 7 days, 30 days and all-time, exportable to CSV and Markdown. Medicraft: a prompt history of the last 20 prompts, no per-generation cost. Astria: per-image rates published on Astria's pricing page, metered against your Astria balance.
• Reference images. Creator MAX: up to 14 on Google models, 15 on OpenAI, 2 on xAI, dragged from disk, pasted, or pulled from any layer in the open document. Medicraft: supported, no number published. Astria: supported, no number published.
• Photoshop version. Creator MAX: 2025 (26.0) or newer. Astria: 2025 (26) or newer. Medicraft: 24.2 (2023) or newer, which is the widest of the three.
• Refunds. Creator MAX: handled by whichever store charged you, and aescripts publishes a free trial. Medicraft: same two stores, and aescripts publishes a free trial for it too. Astria: all sales final.

Both our panel and Medicraft's are rated on the Adobe Creative Cloud Marketplace, so those two numbers are at least measured the same way. On 26 September 2026 Medicraft's listing shows 2.8 from 32 ratings, and the distribution is split rather than mediocre: 14 five-star ratings and 17 one-star. Creator MAX shows 5.0 from 1 rating.

One rating is not evidence of anything and we are not going to present it as though it were. The honest reading is that Medicraft's panel has been in enough hands to collect a polarised record, most of the low reviews describe key and quota errors rather than the plugin's design, and ours has barely been reviewed at all. Astria does not sell through the Marketplace, so it has no comparable number and we have left it out rather than quote a figure from a different kind of source.

Four cases, and none of them is an edge case:

• You only ever do one thing: select a region, describe the change, accept the layer. The presets, the spend dashboard and the exportable history are the reason Creator MAX costs more, and if you will not open them you are paying for them anyway.
• You are on Photoshop 2023 or 2024 and cannot move. Medicraft's runs there; we do not, and no argument changes that.
• You want Nano Banana and nothing else. Both cheap panels reach it; the second and third provider is our argument, not a universal need.
• You would rather keep one billing relationship than three. That is Astria's whole proposition, and for a freelancer generating a few images a week it is a reasonable trade.

• Someone else pays for the generations. A per-generation dollar figure, kept with its prompt and its reference images and exportable to CSV, is an invoice line. A prompt history of the last 20 prompts is not.
• You want to pick the model per generation across three providers, including GPT Image 2.5 and Grok, rather than being handed one family.
• You want the request to leave your machine for the provider and nowhere else. No Bielfor server sits in the path, there is no telemetry, and the key stays local. On Astria's default route the request goes to Astria first, which is a different and legitimate design, just not the same one.
• You work at volume across several documents, need four variations in parallel, 4K output, and results that return to the document they started in.
• You want the panel to keep growing. Version 2.2.0 added two OpenAI models on 25 September 2026, and every update is included in the one-time price.

Per-image provider rates for every model named here are on one page, dated and linked to each provider's own pricing: what one AI image actually costs. If your volume makes the $49.99 look large, that page is where you find out whether it is.

Everything above about the other two plugins was read off pages their own vendors control, on 26 September 2026. All three products ship updates without notice, so treat the date as part of the fact. If a line here no longer matches its source, the source is right and this page is stale.

• Medicraft's listing, feature list and Photoshop version: Nano Banana Generative Fill on aescripts →
• Astria's models, requirements, billing and refund answer: Nano Banana Pro 2 on astria.ai →
• Both ratings, the model lists and the version dates come from the two Adobe Creative Cloud Marketplace listings, searched there by product name. This site does not carry links into that store outside its own buy path, so those two are named rather than linked.

Our side is documented here too: the panel is described in full on the Creator MAX page, the comparison against Photoshop's own Generative Fill is its own page, and getting a provider key takes a couple of minutes at Google Gemini, OpenAI or xAI.