Poolside vs Cursor

A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.

Poolside Coding-model lab shipping open-weight Laguna models and a run-it-yours... Visit Cursor AI code editor and coding agents, now sold inside The X Subscription Visit
RECATOOLS Score 7 / 10 8.6 / 10
Capability 8 9
Value for money 6 7
Ease of use 5 9
ASEAN readiness 5 6
API quality 7 3
Pricing Open Source Freemium
Free tier 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 Free plan: limited agent and Chat requests and a starter allowance for Cursor's coding agents, no card listed
Paid from From $0.06 per 1M input tokens on OpenRouter, with Poolside's own API free for a limited time $8/month (Plus, Grok models only), Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200
Has API ✓ ✗
Open source ✗ ✗
Free to use ✓ ✓
Users — 1m+ developers
Founded 2023 2023
Maker — SpaceX
Verdict

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...

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...

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.