Cursor vs Poolside
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Cursor
AI code editor and coding agents, now sold inside The X Subscription
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.6 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | ||
| Value for money | ||
| Ease of use | ||
| ASEAN readiness | ||
| API quality | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | 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 | $8/month (Plus, Grok models only), Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200 | 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 |
| Maker | SpaceX | — |
| Verdict | 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... |
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 → |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.