Google Nano Banana Pro vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Google Nano Banana Pro and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Google Nano Banana Pro
Studio-quality image generation and editing model built on Gemini 3 for precise, controllable visual creation.
Key features
- Studio-Quality Image Generation: Built on Gemini 3, generates high-fidelity images with detailed control over composition, lighting, and texture for professional outputs.
- Precision Image Editing: Enables targeted edits using prompts and masks to modify or replace elements while preserving surrounding content and realism.
- Prompt-Controlled Refinement: Supports iterative, text-driven workflows so users can refine style, color, and composition across multiple passes.
- High-Resolution Outputs: Produces images suitable for advertising, print, and product photography with emphasis on clarity and reduced artifacts.
- Contextual Consistency: Maintains coherent details and identity across multi-step edits, useful for series of related images or brand consistency.
- Safety and Alignment Measures: Incorporates guardrails and content filters to reduce generation of disallowed or harmful imagery.
- Create images from prompts using Gemini 3-based model
- Edit existing images with fine-grained control
- Studio-quality output targeted at professional workflows
- Precision controls for composition, style, and detail
- Built and maintained by Google DeepMind as part of the Gemini family
Best for
- Advertising and Marketing Creative: Quickly generate studio-quality product shots and campaign visuals with controlled lighting and composition.
- Concept Art and Visual Development: Explore and iterate on stylistic directions for films, games, and illustration using prompt-driven generation.
- Photo Retouching and Restoration: Remove, replace, or retouch elements in photographs while preserving realism for editorial or archival work.
- E-commerce Asset Production: Create consistent, high-fidelity product images and background edits at scale for catalogs and listings.
- Social Media and Content Production: Produce eye-catching visuals, thumbnails, and branded posts optimized for online channels.
- Design Prototyping and Mockups: Rapidly prototype packaging, posters, and UI imagery with precise edits and controlled visual styles.
- Professional image creation for marketing, design, and content production
- Photo and image editing with fine control over details and style
- Rapid prototyping of visual concepts and moodboards
- Generating high-resolution imagery for print and digital media
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.