Laguna by Poolside vs Leonardo AI: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Leonardo AI — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
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.
Leonardo AI
Leonardo-Interactive
Web-based image and video generation platform for creating and editing visuals from text prompts, with SDKs and plugins for integration.
Key features
- Text-to-Image Generation: Produces high-quality images from concise textual prompts with selectable artistic styles and presets to control aesthetics and output type.
- Background Removal: One-click or automated subject isolation tools (including a background-removal-js project) to quickly extract subjects and speed up compositing workflows.
- SDKs and REST API: Official TypeScript and Python SDKs plus OpenAPI/REST endpoints enable programmatic image generation, management, and integration into external applications and pipelines.
- Editor Plugins: Native integrations and community plugins (e.g., Blender texturing plugin, Krita plugin) allow artists to generate and apply assets directly inside popular creative tools.
- Asset Management and Editing: In-browser/image workspace features for editing, upscaling, and iterating on generated images to refine outputs without external software.
- Video Generation: Capabilities to create dynamic visuals and short immersive video content from prompts and style selections for motion assets and concept reels.
- Prompt-driven image generation across multiple artistic styles
- Video generation capabilities (prompt to immersive video)
- Image manipulation tools including one-click background removal
- Official REST API with OpenAPI specification for programmatic access
- Official SDKs: TypeScript (leonardo-ts-sdk) and Python (leonardo-python-sdk)
- Support for synchronous and asynchronous SDK usage (HTTPX / requests / aiohttp variants)
- Official plugins and integrations (e.g., Blender texturing plugin, browser background-removal JS)
- Community-driven integrations and SDKs (Krita plugin, Ruby gem, Go/C# clients and CLIs)
Best for
- Concept Art & Illustration: Rapidly produce multiple styled concept images from prompts to iterate on character, environment, and product ideas during pre-production.
- Game and 3D Texturing: Generate textures and material references via the Blender texturing plugin to accelerate asset creation and integrate directly into 3D workflows.
- E-commerce Imagery: Create product visuals and perform one-click background removal for clean product shots and quick catalog preparation.
- Integrated App Generation: Embed image-generation features into apps or services using the TypeScript or Python SDKs and REST/OpenAPI endpoints for automated content creation.
- Digital Painting Workflow: Use the Krita plugin to generate reference images or elements inside a painting application, streamlining artist workflows and compositing.
- Marketing and Creative Production: Produce styled visuals and short videos for social posts, ads, or campaign mockups to cut production time and costs.
- Concept art and illustration generation from text prompts
- Automated product or marketing image creation and background removal
- Texture generation and workflow integration for 3D artists (Blender plugin)
- Batch or programmatic generation using SDKs and REST API in pipelines
- Rapid prototyping of visuals for games, ads, and social media
- Integrating Leonardo image tools into creative apps (Krita, custom tooling)