Google Whisk vs Laguna by Poolside: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Google Whisk and Laguna by Poolside — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Google Whisk
Experimental web tool that uses images as prompts to visualize ideas and craft visual stories.
Key features
- Image-as-Prompt Input: Accepts user-provided images as the primary input to seed visualizations and guide output generation, enabling idea exploration from existing visuals.
- Visual Storytelling Focus: Provides tools and workflows geared toward arranging and refining visual elements into a coherent narrative or presentation to communicate ideas.
- Rapid Prototyping Experience: Positioned as a Labs experiment, Whisk emphasizes quick iteration and exploratory workflows that let users test concepts without heavy setup.
- Web-Based Accessibility: Delivered as a browser-accessible Labs tool so users can try image-prompt workflows without installing software or configuring environments.
- Refinement & Iteration: Supports iterative editing of prompts and visual outputs so creators can progressively refine visuals and story structure (experimental capabilities may vary).
- Use images as prompts to drive visual outputs
- Visualize ideas and concepts from image-based inputs
- Support for narrative/storytelling workflows using images
- Web-based UI hosted under Google Labs (labs.google/fx)
- Experimental preview — intended for exploration and feedback
Best for
- Concept Visualization: Turn a photo, sketch, or mood image into a set of visual explorations to communicate product, design, or branding concepts during early-stage ideation.
- Storyboarding & Narratives: Use images as seeds to assemble visual storyboards or sequences that illustrate a narrative arc for presentations, pitches, or creative projects.
- Marketing & Content Creation: Rapidly prototype visual assets and scene ideas from reference images to inform campaign creatives or social media content planning.
- Creative Prototyping: Experiment with different visual directions by iterating on image prompts and generated outputs to evaluate style, composition, and mood.
- Educational Visual Aids: Create illustrative visual sequences or concept visuals from real-world images to support lectures, lessons, or explanatory content.
- Rapidly prototype visual concepts from reference images
- Create narrative or storyboards guided by image prompts
- Generate visual assets for presentations or social media
- Explore multimodal creative workflows and ideation
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.