Laguna by Poolside vs Project Genie: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Project Genie — 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.
Project Genie
Google (Google Labs)
An experimental Google Labs project exploring generative assistant prototypes and interactive AI demos.
Key features
- Web-based Interactive Demo: A browser-hosted interface for trying prototype assistant behaviors and workflows, enabling live interaction and rapid observation of model output.
- Prototype Assistant Flows: Demonstrates conversational and task-planning flows to explore new assistant patterns, task breakdowns, and multi-step interactions for user testing.
- Feedback & Telemetry: Built to collect user feedback and usage signals to inform research decisions, iterate on designs, and identify failure modes.
- Responsible Deployment Controls: Includes mechanisms and UI elements focused on safety, privacy notices, and moderation/guardrails to evaluate real-world impacts during experiments.
- Rapid Iteration Platform: Supports fast updates to prompts, UI components, and integration points so researchers and engineers can test variations quickly.
- Discovery hub for experimental AI projects and demos
- Centralized listing and descriptions of emerging Google AI tools
- Emphasis on responsible exploration and public access to prototypes
- Links/backing to individual experiment pages for demos and details
- Public-facing explanations and promotional content rather than technical API docs
Best for
- Design validation: Let product teams test conversational assistant patterns and UI interactions with real users before investing in production development.
- Research experiments: Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback on new generative behaviors, safety mitigations, and model responses for academic or internal research.
- Prototype demonstrations: Showcase possible assistant features to stakeholders or partners using an interactive web demo rather than static mockups.
- Usability testing: Evaluate how users understand and interact with multi-step task planners, clarifying prompts, and suggested actions in a controlled environment.
- Safety evaluation: Trial moderation, privacy notices, and fallback behaviors to observe failure modes and tune guardrails prior to broader rollout.
- Discover and try early-stage Google AI experiments
- Track new tools and research prototypes from Google
- Demonstrate capabilities of experimental models to users and stakeholders
- Provide a public feedback channel for prototype improvement