Claude 4.5 vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Claude 4.5 and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Claude 4.5
Anthropic
Hybrid reasoning model optimized for coding, building complex agents, and interacting with computers, with a 200K token context window.
Key features
- Large Context Window: Supports a 200K token context window enabling long-form reasoning, multi-file codebases, and extended agent histories for complex workflows.
- Best-in-Class Coding: Verified state-of-the-art performance on coding benchmarks (SWE-bench) with improvements across planning, system design, code organization, and secure coding practices.
- Agent SDK and Agentic Capabilities: Provides a Claude Agent SDK and infrastructure to build complex, multi-step autonomous agents that coordinate tools and workflows reliably.
- Robust Tool & Computer Use: Enhanced tool-call reliability including a bug fix that preserves trailing newlines in string parameters and defenses against prompt injection attacks when interacting with external tools and systems.
- Safety and Alignment Improvements: Extensive safety training to reduce concerning behaviors (sycophancy, deception, power-seeking) and improved adherence to instructions and policy constraints.
- Multi-Platform Availability: Available through Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and partner integrations such as GitHub Copilot for developer tooling.
- 200K-token context window for long-form reasoning and multi-step workflows
- State-of-the-art coding performance (SWE-bench verified)
- Optimized for building complex agents and orchestration
- Improved planning, system design, and instruction following
- Enhanced security engineering and vulnerability detection capabilities
- Defenses against prompt injection attacks and improved alignment
- Preserves trailing newlines in tool call string parameters (bug fix)
- Available via Anthropic API, Claude.ai, Claude Code, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI
- Claude Agent SDK: developer tooling and building blocks for agent infrastructure
- Integration/availability in GitHub Copilot (select plans)
Best for
- End-to-End Software Development: Generate, refactor, and architect multi-file projects, leveraging 200K context for design documents, large codebases, and long-running code edits.
- Agent-Driven Automation: Build autonomous agents that orchestrate tools, APIs, and human-in-the-loop steps for tasks like automated incident response, orchestration, or workflow automation using the Claude Agent SDK.
- Security Engineering and Red Teaming: Automate vulnerability discovery, triage, and exploit scenario generation; demonstrated high success rates on benchmarks like Cybench and CyberGym for security tasks.
- Code Modernization and Migration: Translate legacy systems to modern languages, reorganize projects, and propose architectural improvements with detailed planning and system-design outputs.
- Developer Tooling Integration: Power interactive coding assistants in IDEs and services (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) for chat, edit, and agent modes with faster, accurate responses.
- Regulated Enterprise Solutions: Deploy in regulated industries (through partnerships and enterprise plans) for customer support, financial services, and government use cases with compliance and safety controls.
- End-to-end software development: code generation, refactoring, code reviews, and architectural planning
- Building and orchestrating complex autonomous agents and agentic workflows
- Security: vulnerability discovery, red teaming, and automated security engineering assistance
- Tool use and automation: driving external tools, editors, and system operations with precise parameter handling
- Customer support and knowledge-base automation requiring long context retention
- Education and tutoring for complex multi-step problems and programming instruction
- Enterprise deployments in regulated industries via cloud marketplace integrations
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.