Laguna by Poolside vs Wan2.5 AI Video Generator: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Wan2.5 AI Video Generator — 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.
Wan2.5 AI Video Generator
Alibaba Group
Wan2.5 is Alibaba’s open-source video generation model that creates cinematic text- or image-driven videos with advanced motion and control.
Key features
- Multi-Modal Generation: Supports both text-to-video and image-to-video workflows, allowing users to generate videos from prompts, single images, or combined inputs for richer outputs.
- Advanced Cinematic Control: Provides controls for cinematic composition and camera-like motion behaviors to produce filmic framing, pacing, and scene transitions.
- Complex Motion Synthesis: Trained to generate realistic, varied motions and dynamics (including human and object motion) with improved temporal consistency over previous Wan versions.
- High-Resolution & Aspect Options: Produces outputs at common delivery resolutions (e.g., 480P and 1080P) and supports 6+ aspect ratios to match social, mobile, and broadcast formats.
- Wan‑VAE Architecture: Utilizes a 3D causal VAE design for efficient spatio-temporal compression, enabling long-sequence encoding/decoding and better preservation of historical temporal information.
- Smart Prompt Rewriting: Includes prompt-rewriting/processing capabilities (on consumer platforms) to refine user inputs for higher-quality and more targeted video outputs.
- Open-Source Availability: Released openly by Alibaba, allowing third-party platforms and developers to integrate, fine-tune, or run the model within their own services.