Laguna by Poolside vs Stability AI: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Stability 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.
Stability AI
Stability AI
Provider of multimodal generative models and production-ready media generation and editing tools for image, audio, video, 3D and language.
Key features
- Multimodal Model Library: Publishes and maintains a wide range of pretrained models for text-to-image, text-to-audio, image-to-3D, text-to-video and language tasks, enabling developers to select models for specific media modalities and quality/size tradeoffs.
- High-resolution Image Synthesis: Provides and supports state-of-the-art diffusion models (Stable Diffusion family, SDXL variants) that create high-fidelity images and are available with optimized weights for different GPU vendors.
- Language Models and Chat: Offers language model checkpoints and tuned conversational models (StableLM, Stable Beluga variants) for instruction following, chat and text generation tasks with community and research preview deployments.
- Audio and Video Generative Tools: Maintains generative audio and video model projects (e.g., stable-audio, image-to-video) for conditional audio generation and image-to-video conversion workflows.
- Hardware Optimizations: Supplies AMD- and NVIDIA-optimized model builds (TensorRT/AMDGPU variants) and guidance to run models efficiently on different accelerators for production deployments.
- Open-source Repositories & Licensing: Publishes code, model checkpoints and licensing terms on GitHub and Hugging Face to support research, fine-tuning and commercial integration where licenses permit.