Laguna by Poolside vs Wan 2.6: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Wan 2.6 — 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.
Wan 2.6
Wan AI
Wan 2.6 is Wan's multimodal video-generation model for text-to-video, image-to-video, text-to-image, image-to-image, and image editing.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Converts natural-language prompts into multi-frame video outputs, enabling rapid creation of animated concept sequences from text descriptions.
- Image-to-Video Conversion: Transforms a static image into temporally coherent video content, facilitating motion design and animation starting from existing visuals.
- Text-to-Image and Image-to-Image: Produces new images from textual prompts and refines or reimagines existing images while preserving stylistic or semantic constraints.
- Image Editing Tools: Provides in-model editing capabilities to modify, retouch, or augment images based on textual or visual instructions within the platform.
- Multimodal Input Support: Accepts both text and image inputs to guide generation, allowing combined prompt-and-reference workflows for greater control.
- Creative Workflow Integration: Designed as part of the Wan platform to streamline creative iteration, enabling creators to prototype and refine ideas quickly using unified tools.
- Text-to-image synthesis from natural-language prompts
- Image-to-image transformation and style transfer
- Text-to-video generation for short-form video creation
- Image-to-video conversion and animation of stills
- Image editing tools (retouching, compositing, iterative edits)
- Web-based platform for onboarding and content export
- Workflow tools for rapid prototyping and iterative refinement
Best for
- Marketing Video Production: Generate short promotional videos from campaign briefs to accelerate social media and ad content creation without full production pipelines.
- Concept Storyboarding: Create animated storyboards from text descriptions to visualize scenes and motion for pre-production and client presentations.
- Visual Asset Variant Creation: Produce multiple stylistic or compositional variants of an image for A/B testing, campaign variations, or iterative design.
- Rapid Prototyping for Creatives: Quickly prototype visual concepts and motion ideas from prompts to explore creative directions before committing to full production.
- Content Repurposing: Transform existing images into animated formats suitable for reels, ads, or dynamic website assets to increase content lifespan.
- Image Repair and Enhancement: Use image-editing capabilities to retouch, adjust, or modify assets guided by textual instructions to meet project requirements.
- Generating concept art and visual assets from text prompts for design and game development
- Creating short promotional videos and social media content from prompts or images
- Transforming and stylizing existing images for marketing and advertising
- Rapid prototyping of visual ideas and storyboarding for video production
- Image retouching and automated editing to accelerate creative workflows