Is Nova 2 Lite a good deal?

As of Sep 23, 2026, Nova 2 Lite is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 72.9 higher at the same price, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 72.9 points higher than Nova 2 Lite at the same price, $0.85 per million tokens for both.

Nova 2 Lite takes text, image, video, file, returns up to 65,535 tokens from a 1,000,000-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.

Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 3 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Nova 2 Lite scores 1362.6 at $0.85 per million tokens for this mix.

Envelope-safe replacements

Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You save
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite	1435.5 +72.9	$0.850/M	0%
Gemini 2.5 Flash	1417.3 +54.7	$0.850/M	0%
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview	1415.3 +52.7	$0.563/M	34%

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You give up
GLM 5.3 Flash	1471.9	$0.237/M	file
MiMo-V2.5-Pro	1464.8	$0.544/M	image, video, file
Qwen3.7 Plus	1454.2	$0.560/M	video, file
Gemma 4 31B	1441.7	$0.153/M	context, max output, file
Hy3	1440.6	$0.144/M	context, image, video, file

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