Laguna by Poolside vs Willow on IOS: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Laguna by Poolside and Willow on IOS — 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.
Willow on IOS
Willow Voice
Fast, context-aware speech-to-text dictation for Mac and iPhone with custom dictionaries and privacy-focused handling.
Key features
- Real-time Dictation: Converts spoken input into text on macOS and iPhone with immediate transcription for emails, documents, notes, and messages to speed up writing workflows.
- Context-Aware Processing: Uses contextual language understanding to improve accuracy and punctuation, adapting transcription to sentence structure and conversational context.
- Custom Dictionaries: Allows users to add domain-specific vocabulary, names, and technical terms so transcriptions reflect industry- or user-specific language correctly.
- Automatic Editing & Formatting: Applies automatic edits, punctuation, and formatting rules to raw transcribed text to reduce manual cleanup after dictation.
- App Integrations: Designed to work across common workflows and apps (email, documents, note-taking, messaging, and the Cursor editor) to insert transcribed text where users work.
- Privacy-Focused Handling: Emphasizes secure and private handling of voice data and transcription results to protect user information and sensitive content.
- Real-time speech-to-text dictation on iPhone and Mac
- Context-aware automatic edits to improve transcript quality
- Custom dictionaries and terminology support
- Privacy-focused operation with options for local/self-hosted inference
- Integration-ready: supports use in email, documents, note-taking, messaging, and developer workflows
- Willow Inference Server for self-hosted STT, TTS, LLM, and WebRTC inference
Best for
- Writing emails hands-free: Dictate long or short emails on Mac or iPhone to compose messages faster without switching to a keyboard.
- Meeting and lecture notes: Capture spoken content during meetings or lectures and get edited, punctuated notes ready for review and sharing.
- Document drafting and editing: Rapidly create drafts of reports, articles, or documents via voice, with automatic formatting reducing post-edit effort.
- Messaging and quick replies: Compose rapid, accurate message responses in chat and SMS apps using voice input on iPhone.
- Technical and domain-specific transcription: Use custom dictionaries to accurately transcribe industry jargon, code-related terms, names, and acronyms for developer or specialist workflows (e.g., Cursor integration).
- Accessibility and hands-free computing: Provide an accessible input method for users with mobility or dexterity impairments who need reliable speech-to-text on macOS and iOS.
- Hands-free email and document composition on iPhone and Mac
- Faster note-taking and meeting transcription
- Voice-driven messaging and chat input
- Accessibility for users needing speech input
- Enterprise/local deployment using Willow Inference Server for private on-premise transcription and TTS
- Developer integration for embedding STT/TTS/LLM capabilities into apps or real-time WebRTC flows