Gemini 3 vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Gemini 3 and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Gemini 3
Gemini 3 is Google’s most advanced multimodal model, combining reasoning, agentic capabilities, and rich multimodal understanding for apps and developers.
Key features
- Advanced Reasoning: Improved chain-of-thought and long-context reasoning capabilities to solve complex problems, plan multi-step tasks, and provide more accurate, context-aware responses.
- Multimodal Understanding: Processes and synthesizes information across text and visual inputs (images and richer media) to generate coherent multimodal outputs and assist in visual tasks.
- Agentic Capabilities: Built-in support for agent workflows that can take actions, call tools, and orchestrate multi-step processes to complete tasks autonomously or with human input.
- Developer Tooling (Antigravity): Integration with Google’s agent development platform (Antigravity) to create, debug, and deploy custom agent behaviors and pipelines for production use.
- Gemini App Integration: Delivered inside the Gemini app (including Gemini 3 Pro for Workspace customers) with richer, dynamic interfaces for interactive assistance across Google Workspace.
- Coding Assistance: Agentic coding features that help generate, refactor, and reason about code, and support developer workflows with contextual understanding and execution guidance.
- Dynamic User Experiences: New interfaces and UX patterns enabled by Gemini 3 to make conversations, document editing, and multimodal tasks more interactive and contextually adaptive.
- High-capacity multimodal understanding (text + images and other modalities mentioned in announcements)
- Improved reasoning and problem-solving capabilities over prior Gemini releases
- Agentic capabilities for building autonomous or semi-autonomous agents
- Google Antigravity: an agentic development platform for creating and orchestrating agents
- Integration into the Gemini app and availability for Google Workspace customers (Gemini 3 Pro)
- Developer-facing features for advanced coding and agentic coding assistants
- Dynamic and rich user interfaces in the Gemini app to leverage model capabilities
- APIs and developer tooling (announced developer orientation for agentic features and integrations)
Best for
- Interactive Developer Agents: Use Gemini 3 to build agents that write, test, debug, and refactor code, or integrate with CI tools to automate development tasks.
- Workspace Productivity: Embed Gemini 3 in Google Workspace to draft, summarize, and reorganize documents and email, or to generate context-aware meeting notes and action items.
- Multimodal Content Creation: Generate and edit content that combines text and images (and richer media where supported), such as marketing assets, tutorials, or visual reports.
- Automated Research & Analysis: Perform complex data interpretation and summarization across long documents and multimodal sources to accelerate research, due diligence, and decision making.
- Agent-Orchestrated Workflows: Create agent pipelines that call external tools, schedule tasks, and coordinate multi-step processes (e.g., customer onboarding, report generation).
- Conversational Interfaces: Power intelligent chat assistants and support bots that use multimodal inputs and improved reasoning to resolve user queries with higher accuracy.
- Building agentic applications that perform multi-step tasks and automation
- Advanced coding assistants that leverage agentic reasoning for development workflows
- Productivity enhancements within Google Workspace via Gemini 3 Pro in the Gemini app
- Multimodal content creation and analysis (combining text and images)
- Complex reasoning tasks such as planning, synthesis, and decision support
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.