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.
Anthropic API
Token-metered API access to Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku
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Cursor
AI-first VS Code fork — agentic, codebase-aware editing
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Magic.dev
Frontier coding model with 100M-token context window
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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 | Paid | Freemium | Contact | Enterprise |
| Free tier | — | Hobby plan — standing free tier (not just a trial), 2,000 completions / 50 slow premium requests per month, no card required | — | — |
| Paid from | — | $20/month (Pro); Pro+ $60/month; Ultra $200/month; Teams $40/user/month | — | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Users | — | 1m+ developers | — | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2022 | 2022 | — |
| Maker | — | SpaceX | — | — |
| Verdict | The Anthropic API remains the most direct route to Claude's reasoning and coding strength, with clean Python and TypeScript SDKs, well-documented tool use, prompt caching that cuts repeated-context cost by 90%, and a 1M-... |
Cursor is the most polished AI-first code editor going — a VS Code fork that bakes model-aware autocomplete, multi-file agent edits and chat-with-your-codebase into the core editing loop. Tab completion and Composer are... |
Magic.dev is an AI research company building frontier code-generation models, best known for pursuing extremely long context windows (its LTM models targeting up to 100M tokens) aimed at reasoning over entire codebases a... |
Poolside's premise — a coding model trained with reinforcement learning from actual code execution, deployed inside your own AWS environment rather than through a third-party API — is still one of the more credible infra... |
| 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.