Claude API (Anthropic API) vs Cursor vs Magic.dev vs Poolside
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Claude API (Anthropic API)
Anthropic's metered API for Claude Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable
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Cursor
AI code editor and coding agents, now sold inside The X Subscription
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Magic.dev
Coding-model research lab; nothing released yet
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.7 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 5.8 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Usage_based | Freemium | Unknown | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | Free plan: limited agent and Chat requests and a starter allowance for Cursor's coding agents, no card listed | — | Laguna S 2.1 and XS 2.1 weights free on Hugging Face (OpenMDW-1.1; older XS.2 and M.1 Apache 2.0), free OpenRouter endpoints, Poolside API free for a limited time |
| Paid from | From $0.10 per million input tokens (Claude Haiku 5.5, prompts up to 100K tokens) | $8/month (Plus, Grok models only), Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200 | No product on sale, no price, API or waitlist published (Oct 2026) | From $0.06 per 1M input tokens on OpenRouter, with Poolside's own API free for a limited time |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | — | 1m+ developers | — | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 |
| Maker | Anthropic | SpaceX | — | — |
| Verdict | The Claude API offers four current models with a 1M-token context window across the range, from Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens to Fable 5.1 at $10, plus published discounts that matter in practice: half pric... |
Cursor remains one of the strongest AI editors: agents that work across a whole codebase, cloud agents and automations, and Bugbot reviews, with Grok and Composer models included in a weekly allowance. The October 2026 m... |
Magic pursues ultra-long context, with LTM-2-mini trained on up to 100 million tokens, and by its own account compute-efficient pretraining, aimed at automating software engineering. The research write-ups are substantiv... |
Poolside has become one of the more interesting open-weight coding labs. Laguna S 2.1 is a 118B mixture-of-experts model with 8B active parameters and a one-million-token context, its weights are downloadable under OpenM... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.