Laguna by Poolside vs Google Vertex AI: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Google Vertex 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.
Google Vertex AI
Enterprise-ready, fully-managed, unified AI development platform for building, deploying, and managing ML and generative models.
Key features
- Unified Development Studio: Vertex AI Studio provides a single web-based workbench for prototyping, training, evaluating, and deploying models, simplifying workflows across teams and reducing context switching.
- Model Garden & Foundation Models: Access to a curated set of first‑party, open‑source, and third‑party foundation models (160+ models, e.g., Gemini, Gemma, Llama 3, Claude 3) for text, vision, audio, and multimodal use cases, enabling rapid experimentation and fine-tuning.
- Managed Datasets and Feature Store: Fully managed dataset types (tabular, text, image, video) and an online Feature Store for consistent feature serving, metadata management, and integration with training and serving pipelines.
- Agent Builder and Conversational Tools: Tools to create multi-step agents and conversational applications that combine LLMs with tool integrations, function calling and orchestration for production assistants and workflows.
- Vertex Pipelines & MLOps: End-to-end CI/CD and workflow orchestration for ML with pipelines, model registry, deployment targets (online and batch), automatic scaling, and model monitoring for drift and performance.
- SDKs, Samples and Notebooks: Official Python SDK (googleapis/python-aiplatform), extensive sample repositories and starter notebooks (vertex-ai-samples) to accelerate development, reproducible experiments, and automation.
- Integrations with Google Data Services: Native integration with BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Data Labeling, and other Google Cloud services for data ingestion, labeling, large-scale training, and operational analytics.
- Managed Serving & Monitoring: Fully managed online and batch prediction endpoints with autoscaling, logging, monitoring, and tools for explainability and model performance tracking in production.
- Unified platform covering dataset management, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring
- Vertex AI Studio: web-based development and model management UI
- Agent Builder: tooling for building conversational agents and agent orchestration
- Access to 160+ foundation models and curated Model Garden (first-party, open-source, third-party)
- AutoML workflows for no-code/low-code model training alongside support for custom training code
- Managed datasets for tabular, text, image, and video data with import and labeling support
- Python SDK (google-cloud-aiplatform) with GAPIC-backed auto-generated client libraries
- Support for experiments, notebooks, and sample repositories for reproducible development
- Model serving and online/ batch prediction with feature store and online serving integration
- Infrastructure-as-code and provisioning support (e.g., Terraform modules for Vertex AI resources)
- Integration with Google Cloud services (GCS, BigQuery, IAM, monitoring) and CI/CD pipelines
Best for
- Productionizing ML Models: Train, validate, register and deploy supervised or custom models at scale using pipelines, model registry, autoscaled endpoints, and monitoring for continuous delivery.
- Building Generative Applications: Use foundation models from the Model Garden and Agent Builder to create chatbots, content generation systems, summarization services, and multimodal assistants.
- Enterprise Search and Knowledge Retrieval: Implement enterprise search solutions over website and internal data using Vertex AI Search and integrated generative models for retrieval-augmented generation.
- Computer Vision and Video ML: Create managed image and video datasets, run training and inference pipelines for object detection, classification, and video analysis with scalable serving.
- MLOps and Compliance Workflows: Implement reproducible pipelines, model monitoring, drift detection, explainability, and governance to meet enterprise compliance and operational requirements.
- Data Scientist Workbench and Experimentation: Use the SDK, sample notebooks, and model garden to iterate rapidly on experiments, fine-tune foundation models, and benchmark custom models with cloud compute.
- Build and deploy generative AI applications using foundation models hosted in Vertex AI
- Train AutoML or custom ML models on managed datasets for production prediction workloads
- Implement MLOps workflows: experiments, model registry, continuous training and deployment
- Create conversational agents and agent orchestration using Agent Builder
- Host and serve models with online feature serving via Feature Store for low-latency inference
- Integrate Vertex AI with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to provision reproducible environments
- Run notebooks and sample pipelines for prototyping, research, and production migration