Laguna by Poolside vs Nova Act by Amazon: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Nova Act by Amazon — 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.
Nova Act by Amazon
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
A browser-focused agent model and AWS service that automates UI workflows from natural language and escalates to humans when needed.
Key features
- Natural-Language Browser Control: Converts conversational instructions into deterministic browser actions (click, type, scroll, navigate) to automate UI workflows without writing low-level automation scripts.
- Python SDK and IDE Integration: Provides a Python SDK plus IDE extensions (VS Code, Cursor, etc.) for chat-to-script generation, live debugging, step-by-step builders, and action viewers to iterate on agents inside developer tools.
- Human-in-the-Loop Escalation: Built-in patterns and reference implementations to escalate complex or uncertain steps to human supervisors and integrate notification and HITL workflows into production.
- Fleet Deployment and Management on AWS: Deploy, scale, and manage fleets of Nova Act agents through AWS integration (Bedrock/other AWS services) for running production UI automation at scale with monitoring and logs.
- QA and Test Automation Support: Plugins and sample projects (pytest integration, parallel execution, HTML reporting) for end-to-end QA automation and regression testing in real browser sessions.
- Observability and Logging: Structured logs, user-data directories per test/session, and reporting artifacts to trace agent actions, diagnose failures, and audit automated workflows.
- Chat-to-Script & Step Builder: Interactive chat-driven generation of automation scripts and step-by-step workflow builders that let non-experts create or refine browser tasks quickly.
- Action Viewer and Live Debugging: Visual tools to inspect, replay, and debug agent-performed actions during development to improve reliability and reproducibility.
- Natural-language to browser-action translation (click, type, scroll, navigate)
- Human-in-the-loop escalation and human intervention service reference implementation
- Python SDK for building and running agents and workflows
- IDE extensions (Visual Studio Code, Kiro, Cursor) with chat-to-script, step-by-step builder, live debugging, and action viewer
- Web playground at nova.amazon.com/act for experimentation
- Deploy agents to AWS and integrate with Bedrock and AWS monitoring/console
- QA and end-to-end testing integrations (pytest plugins, parallel test execution, HTML reporting)
- Environment-driven auth and configuration (NOVA_ACT_API_KEY, AWS_PROFILE, AWS_REGION)
- Logging, user-data directories, and organized per-test/session logs for debugging and audit
- Sample repositories and reference implementations on GitHub for HITL patterns and notifications
Best for
- Automating repetitive web UI tasks (form filling, data entry, routine admin workflows) by translating business instructions into browser actions without manual scripting.
- End-to-end QA and regression testing: run parallel browser tests with Nova Act SDK and pytest integration to validate web application behavior and generate HTML reports.
- Data extraction and structured scraping inside authenticated sessions where agents mimic human browser interactions while following escalation and audit rules.
- Customer support and operations automation: have agents navigate web consoles, gather diagnostics, or perform standard support procedures, escalating to human operators when needed.
- Business process automation across SaaS apps: coordinate cross-application sequences (download reports, upload records, reconcile data) using natural language workflows combined with Python logic.
- Human-in-the-loop compliance flows: automate most steps of compliance checks while routing ambiguous or high-risk decisions to supervisors through the provided HITL reference service.
- Developer productivity: quickly prototype and debug browser automation in the Nova web playground or IDE extension, then deploy reliable agents to AWS for production use.
- Automating repetitive UI workflows in production web apps (data entry, form submission, navigation)
- End-to-end QA and browser-based testing with parallel execution and custom reporting
- Building agent fleets to run scheduled or event-driven browser tasks at scale
- Human-in-the-loop supervision for sensitive or ambiguous automation steps
- Rapid prototyping and debugging of browser agents inside an IDE or web playground