Gemini 2.5 Pro vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Gemini 2.5 Pro and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Gemini 2.5 Pro
Google DeepMind's advanced multimodal 'thinking' model optimized for complex reasoning, coding, long-context, and transcription tasks.
Key features
- Native multimodal architecture for integrated reasoning across text, audio and other inputs
- Large context window (commonly reported as 1M tokens; some builds report larger windows)
- Designed as a 'thinking model' with improved logical and chain-of-thought capabilities
- Built-in function calling support for reliable tool usage and structured outputs (JSON/function calls)
- Grounding integrations such as Google Search to fetch and verify external information
- Built-in developer tools: file operations, shell command execution, web fetching
- Multiple delivery/integration options: Gemini CLI, Gemini API key, Vertex AI
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) extensibility for custom integrations and toolchains
- Audio transcription and speaker diarization support for multi-speaker long-form audio
- Usage-based billing and selectable models for paid tiers; automatic updates in some clients
Best for
- Complex reasoning tasks and multi-step problem solving
- Code generation, debugging assistance, and terminal-first developer workflows
- Long-form document analysis and summarization using large context windows
- Multimodal content generation and understanding combining text, audio, and web data
- Audio transcription and multi-speaker diarization for podcasts and meeting recordings
- Production deployments and enterprise workflows via Vertex AI
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.