Alloy vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Alloy and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Alloy
Alloy
Create pixel-perfect, interactive prototypes by capturing your real product pages across desktop and mobile.
Key features
- Instant Browser Capture: A browser extension captures live product pages and UI state instantly to create prototypes that mirror the real product’s visuals and layout.
- Pixel-Perfect Prototypes: Builds lifelike, pixel-accurate prototypes that preserve styling and layout for realistic demos and usability testing.
- Interactive Behavior: Supports interactive prototypes with realistic navigation and interactions so stakeholders can experience flows like the real product.
- Cross-Platform Clients: Desktop (macOS, Windows), web, iOS and Android apps allow capturing, viewing, and testing prototypes across devices.
- AI-Powered Prototyping: Uses AI to accelerate prototype generation and streamline the process of converting captured pages into interactive mockups.
- Real-Time Mobile Collaboration: Mobile app features enable real-time communication and synchronization between devices for field teams and device testing.
- Sharing & Team Workflows: Tools to share prototypes with teammates and customers for feedback, demos, and user testing with minimal setup.
- Quick Start Guides: Step-by-step documentation and guides to get started quickly, including capturing pages and building shareable prototypes.
- Instantly capture real product pages from the browser via a browser extension
- Generate lifelike, interactive prototypes that mirror the real product UI
- Cross-platform apps: macOS, Windows, Web, iOS and Android
- AI-powered assistance for rapid prototyping (public content references AI-powered prototyping)
- Share prototypes with teams and customers for feedback and demos
- Alloy Mobile for real-time communication between devices/field users
Best for
- Rapid UX Validation: Capture a live web page and convert it into a clickable prototype to run usability tests with users within hours.
- Stakeholder Demos: Produce pixel-perfect interactive demos from the actual product to show realistic flows to customers or executives.
- Cross-Device Testing: Use desktop and mobile clients to test interactions and layouts across platforms and replicate real-device behavior.
- Field Collaboration: Equip field teams with Alloy Mobile to communicate in real time between devices and validate device-specific workflows.
- Design Iteration: Quickly capture current product screens, iterate on interactions, and share updated prototypes for fast feedback cycles.
- Pre-Release QA: Create prototypes from the production UI to validate edge-case interactions and flows before shipping changes to users.
- Design teams creating high-fidelity prototypes that match the live product for usability testing
- Product teams demonstrating realistic product flows to stakeholders and customers
- Marketing and sales teams preparing interactive demos that reflect current product UI
- Field teams using Alloy Mobile for real-time device-to-device communication during installations or on-site workflows
Laguna by Poolside
Poolside
Poolside's family of open Mixture-of-Experts foundation models for agentic coding — XS.2 runs locally, M.1 reaches 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified.
Key features
- Two Model Sizes: Laguna XS.2 (33B total / 3B active) and Laguna M.1 (225B total / 23B active) target different latency and capability needs.
- Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Routes each token through a subset of experts for efficiency at large scale.
- Local Deployment: XS.2 is small enough to run on a Mac with 36 GB of RAM via Ollama under an Apache 2.0 license.
- Strong SWE-bench Results: XS.2 hits 68.2% and M.1 reaches 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified.
- Bundled Coding Agent: Ships 'pool,' a lightweight terminal-based coding agent.
- Agent Client Protocol: Includes a dual ACP client-server used internally for agent RL training and evaluation.
Best for
- Local Agentic Coding: Running XS.2 on a laptop for private, offline code generation and editing.
- High-Capability Code Tasks: Using M.1 for harder, long-horizon software engineering work.
- Self-Hosted Deployments: Building on open weights to avoid third-party API dependencies.
- Research & Fine-Tuning: Adapting permissively licensed weights for custom coding workflows.
- Benchmarking: Evaluating agentic coding performance against SWE-bench Verified and Pro.