S26 Ultra vs. Pixel 11 Pro XL – Which is Better?

By Josh Teder

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra vs. Google Pixel 11 Pro XL: the best Android flagship for cameras, software, and Privacy Display, tested head to head.

I’ve spent six months with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, and now that it’s been a few weeks since the Pixel 11 Pro XL came out, I wanted to put these phones head to head. Here are my thoughts on how they stack up, and whether there’s really any way the Pixel could be considered an equivalent flagship.

Spec	Galaxy S26 Ultra	Pixel 11 Pro XL
Starting price (US)	$1,299	$1,299
Peak brightness	2,600 nits	3,600 nits
Defining feature	Privacy Display	HiLight light ring
Chip	Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5	Tensor G6
Raw performance	Much stronger	Weaker
Weight	Lighter	Heavier
Lies flat on a table	No, it wobbles	Yes
Magnetic Qi2 charging	Cases only	Built in (Pixelsnap)
S Pen	Included	Not supported
Manual focus in Pro video mode	Yes	No
Camera extras	Instant slow motion	Camera Looks, Magic Capture, Creator Suite, Video Boost
Speakers	Clearer, but harsh highs	Sounded better to me
Battery life	About 2 days	About 2 days

Privacy Display and Brightness

Samsung’s Privacy Display

Two big features really set these phones apart. For the S26 Ultra, that’s the Privacy Display, which uses new Samsung-developed display technology that basically gives your phone’s display a built-in privacy filter with the flip of a switch. You can set it to turn on for specific private apps, like banking apps.

What’s cooler is the Flex Magic Pixel technology that makes this feature work, which can be controlled at the pixel level. You can also have it apply to just the notifications from certain private apps. The Pixel, and frankly no other phone, has this tech.

Brightness and Anti-Reflective Coating

Speaking of displays in general, both are excellent. The Pixel can actually get a bit brighter, at 3,600 peak nits versus 2,600 for the S26 Ultra, though both of those numbers are still pretty bright. The S26 Ultra has a slightly better anti-reflective coating, and overall its display tends to be a bit warmer.

HiLight: The Pixel’s Defining Feature

What HiLight Does

Next up is HiLight, the Pixel 11 Pro’s defining feature this year. If you’ve seen my Nothing Phone (2) review, you’ll know that I’m generally a pretty big fan of lights on the back of phones.

HiLight triggers when you have the phone lying down and you say, “Hey G,” to trigger Gemini. Or you can assign it to turn one of five colors when one of your favorite contacts calls you. And that’s it. That’s all it does. What?

Why It Feels Half-Baked

We now know the LEDs that make up the light ring that powers this feature are true RGB LEDs capable of basically making any color, which makes the HiLight feature feel a bit more half-baked. So much so that somebody has already vibe-coded an app you can sideload onto your Pixel to make the light much more useful. I wrote about it in a quick post, and you’ll find a link to the app in the Learn More section of this post.

Overall, for defining features, I think Samsung’s Privacy Display is more impressive.

Cameras

What about cameras? That’s arguably the feature that has defined Pixels for years now. How do these phones compare? Well, first, let’s go dark.

Night Photos and Video

Samsung announced better night video with the S26 Ultra, and Google rolled out much faster Night Sight photos with the Pixel 11 Pro. The S26 Ultra’s night video doesn’t particularly stand out to me as being better than Google’s. That’s probably because Google still gives you Video Boost, which can really improve the quality of your videos, though not always. Some of my night shots with it turned out totally bizarre.

Also, one really frustrating thing about Video Boost: if you enable 10-bit HDR, the Video Boost files will process in a codec that you cannot play in QuickTime on a Mac. You have to use something like VLC or convert them to a different file format.

The Moon Test

One thing Samsung has been known for years to do is sort of fake moon photos. And boy, does it still do that. But the question I had was whether Google does this as well, especially with its new 120x zoom, which also uses AI to basically figure out how to upscale the image. Yes, they absolutely do. It might be a different process, but it is creating pixels that weren’t actually there in the raw output from the sensor. Sometimes, though, like with the lunar eclipse I shot with both phones, both actually gave me somewhat decent results.

It is creating pixels that weren’t actually there in the raw output from the sensor.

One odd thing I noticed while doing these comparisons is that the video on the Pixel also appears to do this. You’ll see it adjust its exposure so you can actually see the moon at 20x zoom. Interestingly, though, you do not get the same effect when using Video Boost, which makes me think there’s something going on locally on the phone in Google software, and it’s not consistent either.

When I tried to shoot video of the lunar eclipse, the Pixel’s camera struggled to stay focused on the moon. To be fair, Samsung’s did as well, but at least the S26 Ultra has a Pro Video mode that allows you to manually change focus for video. For whatever reason, you do not get this with the Pro mode on the Pixel.

Photo Quality

For night shots, and frankly photos in general, both of these phones are pretty much neck and neck in terms of image quality. You’ll see one photo, like a nighttime streetscape, where the Pixel just nailed the actual look and color, and then you’ll get another photo where the S26 Ultra just produces a better-looking image.

Camera Looks

This year the Pixel does have a really new, interesting suite of features that Samsung doesn’t, though. The first of those is Camera Looks. These are looks you can apply to your camera that change the camera’s default processing at the processing level. Unlike the filters you can use in Samsung’s Gallery app, which allow you to revert to your original image, Google’s Camera Looks are actually destructive. You can’t just revert to the normal default processing, which some people are definitely not going to like.

So then, why have this feature? Well, depending on the Camera Look, Google will actually do less photo processing. This can get you photos that look more like older cameras, which let highlights blow out and have better shadows and contrast. And like with Samsung’s filters, Google gives you a lot of fine-tuning, adjusting not just contrast, shadows, and highlights, but also things like sharpness and grain.

This is a perfect feature for people like me who love to play around with photo editing and the different looks you can get out of cameras, not dissimilar to the film simulations that Fujifilm cameras have that I talked about in my X100VI review.

Selfies

Now, what about the selfie cameras? Here I’ve actually been more impressed with the Pixel overall, especially when you consider the Snapchat test. For daytime shots, with both phones shooting in their default processing mode, I think the Pixel has looked better overall, with a bit better color and a bit more brightness. Its photos generally stand out as the better images, though not in every case. Even in the zoom shot and the portrait shot, I was more impressed with the Pixel’s more realistic bokeh in the background. And in another shot, it didn’t produce the lens flare that the S26 Ultra did.

Video and Extra Camera Features

For video, Google’s Video Boost continues to give the Pixel a bit of an edge in picture quality, though I do prefer the S26 Ultra’s default stabilization as well as its wind noise reduction, both of which I thought were a bit better. The Pixel also has a cool Magic Capture feature, where the phone will record a video and take photos from that video. It’s perfect when you want to document a fast-moving subject like a kid or pet.

Camera Verdict

Factor in the photo and video comparison, plus all of the new Google camera features, plus the new Creator Suite, which can record footage directly into project folders instead of just dumping it into your camera roll and gives you things like a teleprompter, and those features are actually pretty useful, depending on the person. Samsung, of course, still has things like instant slow motion, though via a slightly unintuitive way to trigger it: you have to know to press and hold down while playing a video to get this feature to work. But if you’re looking for the best and most interesting camera system this year, I think Google has a slight edge thanks to those new software features.

Software

Next, let’s talk about software. Here, as you would expect, Google definitely has some advantages.

Google Features First

Probably the biggest advantage is that Google has continued the trend we’ve seen with past Pixels of getting Android features first, like Rambler, the Gemini-powered, next-generation speech dictation model that supports multilingual use and accounts for pauses and ums. You can even give it specific directions and it will just do it, like, “Hm, maybe actually this was too long. Can you clean it up?”

I do prefer the old approach, where you would see your words being typed out as you said them. Now it’s a bit more of a black box until you hit the submit button.

Some other Pixel-exclusive Android features are Pause Point, a new feature that helps you break the habit of checking certain apps or spending too long in them.

Exclusive Pixel Apps

Aside from getting Android features first, the Pixel also has some very good exclusive apps, like Pixel Screenshots and the Weather app. The Screenshots app indexes all of your screenshots locally on your device, making it easy to find information again, like a local artist’s work I saw at an art festival. You can also create things like calendar events and reminders right from your screenshots.

The Weather app is great because it doesn’t kick you out to weather.com or some other website every time you tap something in it. Graphs are actually built into the app. You could potentially try a hacky way to get these apps onto your Samsung phone, but they’re just not available in the Play Store by default.

What Samsung Does Best

Speaking of Samsung, what about its software? The S26 Ultra has some great unique features in One UI. One of my favorites is the Now Bar, the area at the top left of your phone that pops up any time you have a real-time activity, like a timer or media playing in the background. Edge Panels are another feature: a vertical dock where you can pin your favorite apps and features to access no matter where you are in the phone.

Another thing Samsung’s version of Android supports that the Pixel’s doesn’t is the S Pen, which comes with the S26 Ultra. Do I use it? No, only in rare circumstances where I need to quickly sign a document. It can of course do more than that, but I personally struggle to find many uses for it on this phone, especially with how wobbly the S26 Ultra is when you put it on a flat surface. There’s just no way you can convince me Samsung cares about the S Pen and the writing experience if it made the phone this wobbly on a flat surface.

The last standout feature of the S26 Ultra’s software is how well the phone integrates with other devices in Samsung’s Galaxy ecosystem. Samsung makes it really easy to stay in the Galaxy ecosystem. You could argue at this point that Google has almost caught up in major device categories like buds, watches, and maybe tablets, though I don’t really think it’s clear how much Google actually cares about tablets. And then of course there are the new Googlebooks coming out later this year, which will be interesting to compare to what Samsung does with its laptops.

Why I Prefer Pixel’s Software

One other thing I’ll note about software is that you often hear people say they prefer Pixel OS over Samsung’s. After switching back and forth between the two, I tend to find myself in that camp too. Why is that? It’s a combination of aesthetic and feel. Google’s flatter, more colorful Material You design is, I think, a bit more fun out of the box than Samsung’s, which you’d need to fiddle with quite a bit to get a similar vibe.

I also really like the subtle animation tweaks and haptics Google has added for things like pulling down the notification shade, opening the app drawer, or authenticating into the device. You get a really subtle haptic that makes the phone feel a bit more responsive, even though when I looked at both phones side by side on camera, they looked equally fast.

But for me, I don’t think there’s really a true winner in this category, because these phones have pretty different software features that make them distinct enough.

Hardware, Performance, and Battery

All right, now let’s take a look at some of the other hardware differences.

Design and Weight

The Pixel can lie flat on a table without wobbling, which is actually nice. It also has Pixelsnap, the magnetic Qi2 charging standard, built in. The S26 Ultra just has this built into its cases, not the body of the phone itself. Another interesting difference is weight: the S26 Ultra is the lighter phone by a pretty good margin, so it definitely gets a point there.

Performance

Performance between the two is what you would expect: the S26 Ultra trounces Google’s Tensor G6 chip. Does that matter to most people? Probably not. Unless you’re a spec head or a mobile gamer, I don’t think it will generally matter.

However, if you plan to keep this phone for a long time, the increased headroom you get with the S26 Ultra’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip will likely mean it performs better for longer compared to the Pixel. Of course, that depends on how well Google and Samsung continue to optimize future software features and software in general for these devices, but in general day-to-day performance, both phones feel equally fast to me so far.

Speakers

Another surprising difference between these phones is their speakers. To me, surprisingly, the Pixel actually sounded better. Samsung sounds a bit clearer, but that comes with a harshness in the highs that, when you listen at around 60 or 70 percent volume, I just thought sounded kind of harsh compared to the Pixel’s.

Battery Life

For battery life, so far they’ve both been pretty equal for me. On days with heavier usage, like when using the camera systems a lot, I’ll see them get into the 40% range. With more normal usage, which for me is about 2 to 2.5 hours of screen time and 2 hours of background media playback, they’ll be somewhere in the mid-60% range. Normally both are able to last somebody like me about two days.

Which One Should You Buy?

So, is there an obvious winner this year? Yes and no. These phones, look, they’re both pretty good, and this year I think it really comes down to use case.

If you want a phone that gets Google features first, especially the more cutting-edge AI stuff, an arguably more interesting camera app with better photo processing choices, a UI aesthetic with a more fun vibe, better haptics throughout the OS with fun animations to fidget with out of the box, plus a phone with better speakers and one that lies flat on a table (imagine that, Samsung), that’s where I think the Pixel is the better option. I don’t know if it’s because Pixels are newer or I just like the Pixel version of the OS better. Either way, the Pixel has been the Android phone I’ve been finding myself wanting to use more as I’ve been comparing both of these phones.

The Pixel has been the Android phone I’ve been finding myself wanting to use more.

But it’s not for everybody. If you’re a mobile gamer, you want a stylus on your phone, you want a built-in Privacy Display, or you’re already in the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem, then I think you’re going to want the S26 Ultra.

Both phones start at $1,299 here in the US, thanks to RAMageddon. You can see their current prices, and whether any sales are going on, in the Featured Products section of this post, along with the other devices I mentioned. You can also see deals we find at any time by visiting our shop page and searching for “Pixel deals” or “Samsung deals.”

For more comparisons like this one, check out MacBook Neo vs. MacBook Air and Android vs. iOS in 2026. To see more of my reviews of Samsung and Google devices, try my Pixel 10 Pro XL review and S25 Ultra vs. Pixel 10 Pro XL.

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