Google Flow vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Google Flow and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Google Flow
An experimental Google creative interface for AI filmmaking that orchestrates Veo 3, Gemini and Imagen to turn text ideas into cinematic scenes.
Key features
- Prompt-Driven Scene Generation: A natural-language prompt box lets users describe scenes in everyday language and invoke Veo 3 to generate corresponding cinematic video and synchronized native audio (dialogue, ambient sound, music).
- Model Orchestration and Integration: Built to seamlessly integrate outputs from Veo 3 (video+audio), Gemini (language understanding and script/dialogue generation), and Imagen (high-quality image assets) so users can combine multimodal assets in one pipeline.
- Project View and Management: A project-level interface to browse, manage, and access multiple video projects and their generation iterations, enabling organized iteration and versioning of creative concepts.
- Multiple Generation Modes: Switchable generation modes (accessible via dropdown in the prompt box) to tailor outputs — for example, default text-to-video mode or specialized modes for different shot types, styles, or rendering behaviors.
- Intuitive Creative Workflow: Designed for filmmakers and creators with an emphasis on rapid prototyping — allowing idea-to-scene transformation without deep technical knowledge of model parameters or media pipelines.
- Scene Iteration and Refinement: Enables iterative refinement of generated scenes through repeated prompts and adjustments, helping creators converge on desired cinematography, pacing, and audio elements.
- Natural-language prompt-driven video generation (prompt box with multiple generation modes)
- Native audio generation synchronized with visuals (dialogue, ambient sound, music) via Veo 3
- Integration with Google models: Veo 3 (video+audio), Gemini (language), Imagen (images)
- Project management UI for browsing, managing, and iterating on video projects and generations
- Multiple generation modes selectable via dropdown to change output style/parameters
- Designed for rapid prototyping and creative iteration with everyday language inputs
Best for
- Rapid Scene Prototyping: Filmmakers can convert script descriptions or short scene ideas into playable cinematic clips with synchronized audio to evaluate pacing and composition before traditional production.
- Concept Visualization for Storyboards: Directors and writers can generate quick visual and audio storyboards from written prompts to communicate mood, framing, and dialogue to collaborators.
- Script-to-Dialogue Generation: Use Gemini integration to expand short prompts into detailed dialogue and voice action that Veo 3 then renders as synchronized native audio in generated scenes.
- Multimodal Asset Creation: Create image assets, background plates, and reference stills via Imagen integration to composite with generated video for mixed-media productions or promotional content.
- Iterative Creative Exploration: Content creators can rapidly iterate on variations of a scene (lighting, camera angle, audio style) using different generation modes to find an optimal creative direction.
- Prototype Marketing or Social Clips: Quickly produce short cinematic clips for social media or marketing tests without full live-action shoots, using Flow to generate visuals and sound from concise briefs.
- Rapid prototyping of film scenes and storyboards from text prompts
- Generating short cinematic clips with synchronized audio for marketing and ads
- Previsualization for directors and cinematographers
- Content creation for social media and short-form video
- Asset generation for game cinematics or animation preproduction
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.