Laguna by Poolside vs Runway: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Runway — 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.
Runway
Runway
A cloud platform for generating and editing images and video with text, image, and video-based generative tools.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Convert text prompts into short video clips using generative video models, enabling rapid concepting and visual storyboarding.
- Image-to-Video and Image Generation: Produce new images from prompts and transform still images into animated sequences or stylized moving visuals.
- Video Editing & Inpainting: Edit existing footage with tools for object removal, inpainting, and patch-based fixes that integrate generative fills directly on the timeline.
- Background Removal & Green Screen: Replace or remove backgrounds from footage automatically to accelerate compositing and scene changes.
- Model Library & Presets: Access a curated set of pretrained generative models and style presets to achieve different looks without model training.
- Cloud Rendering & Export: Render high-resolution outputs in the cloud and export completed assets in common video and image formats for downstream workflows.
- Collaboration & Project Sharing: Share projects, assets, and edits across teams to enable iterative review and collaborative content production.
- API & Integrations: Programmatic access and integrations to incorporate generation and editing capabilities into external pipelines and tools.
- Text-to-Video generation
- Image-to-Video generation
- Text-to-Image generation
- Model-driven video and image editing workflows
- Multimodal generation (text + images)
- Scalable generation tools trusted by a large user base
Best for
- Marketing Video Production: Rapidly prototype and produce short promotional videos from copy and briefs without full film shoots.
- Social Content Creation: Generate native-format short videos and stylized images for social channels with minimal manual editing.
- Concept Visualization and Previz: Turn written concepts or story beats into quick animated previews for creative review and iteration.
- Post-Production Cleanup: Remove unwanted objects, replace backgrounds, and inpaint damaged frames in existing footage to save VFX time.
- Design and Motion Graphics: Create animated assets, transitions, and stylized backgrounds for use in larger motion-graphics projects.
- Rapid Prototyping for Creators: Experiment with novel visual styles, test variations, and iterate on creative ideas using model presets and quick renders.
- Generating short video clips from text prompts for social or marketing content
- Turning static images into animated video sequences
- Rapid prototyping of visual concepts for design and advertising
- Augmenting video editing pipelines with AI-assisted generation and effects
- Creating visual assets for storytelling, film previsualization, and concept art