I use all three of these tools regularly, and the most honest answer to "which is best?" is that they're not competing for the same job. They overlap in the middle — all three write code — but the edges are clearly different.
Here's how they break down from the perspective of someone building iOS and Android apps with AI tools as part of the daily workflow.
What Each Tool Actually Is
Google Antigravity is an agentic AI assistant. It doesn't just write code — it runs tests, manages files, makes API calls, and handles deployments as part of an autonomous loop. The Google ecosystem integration (Firebase, Vertex AI, Cloud Run) is its strongest differentiator, and it pairs naturally with Gemma 4 and other models you run locally through Ollama or LM Studio.
Cursor is a VS Code fork with AI deeply integrated. It understands your existing codebase context across hundreds of files and uses that to generate, complete, and refactor code that fits what's already there. Think of it as a skilled collaborator who's read your whole project before making any suggestion.
Bolt.new is a browser-based full-stack app generator. You describe what you want, and a working React or Next.js app appears in minutes. It's optimized for zero-to-running-app speed above everything else.
Speed: Zero to Working App
Bolt.new: Fastest. From "build a task manager app" to a deployed app takes under 10 minutes. No setup, no local environment, no configuration.
Antigravity: Fast for complex apps. It takes slightly longer than Bolt to start because it proposes a file structure and confirms the approach before building. But for multi-service apps where Bolt would struggle, Antigravity's agents working in parallel often close the gap.
Cursor: Not optimized for starting from scratch. If you need a new project generated from a description, Cursor is the slowest of the three. Where it inverts is on large existing codebases — 500-line refactors that would break context windows for the other tools are routine for Cursor.
Code Quality and Maintainability
This is the most meaningful difference.
Antigravity generates architecturally reasonable code with a tendency toward long-term maintainability — error handling, separation of concerns, test generation when asked. The agent makes real design decisions, which is both its strength and its risk: if your prompt is ambiguous, it may build something structurally different from what you imagined.
Cursor mirrors your existing patterns. With a well-written .cursorrules file, it generates code that follows your team's conventions consistently across a large codebase. It's the best option for teams with established standards that need to be maintained.
Bolt generates code that works for the demo but often shortcuts maintainability. Inline event handlers, components that do too many things, minimal error handling — these are normal for generated Bolt output. It's not wrong for a prototype, but it means rewriting if the project continues seriously.
Pricing in Practice
Google Antigravity:
- Free tier: monthly credits (reset monthly)
- Pro: ~$20/month + optional credit purchases
- Ultra: $249.99/month (high-volume / teams)
Cursor:
- Free: 500 completions/month
- Pro: $20/month (unlimited + premium models)
- Business: $40/user/month
Bolt.new:
- Free: monthly token limit
- Pro: $20/month (expanded limits)
All three Pro tiers are $20/month. For a solo developer building a few projects per month, any of them fits within that budget. The real cost question is whether you hit the limits — Antigravity's credit system can burn faster than expected on long agentic sessions.
Where Each Tool Wins
Choose Antigravity when:
- You're building on Google Cloud / Firebase and want native integration
- You want to hand off a complete task — implementation, tests, and deploy — to an agent
- You're combining local models (Gemma 4 via Ollama) with cloud agents
- You need CI/CD and AI to work together in the same pipeline
Choose Cursor when:
- You're working on an existing codebase with established patterns
- You need consistent code style across a team
- You want AI-assisted code review on pull requests
- Your project is TypeScript or Python with complex type constraints
Choose Bolt when:
- You need to show something working to a client or stakeholder today
- You're validating an idea before investing in proper architecture
- You have limited coding background and want to see a concept materialize
- Frontend-heavy, relatively simple apps that won't need heavy backend logic
How I Actually Use All Three Together
For a new app, my workflow looks like this:
First 30 minutes: Bolt.new to generate an initial UI. Not to use the code — just to quickly validate the screen layout and user flow before committing to building it for real.
Implementation phase: Switch to Antigravity for the Firebase / Firestore backend, auth logic, and API integration. Let the agent handle the file structure and tests. I'll often use Gemma 4 locally to generate implementation options and then refine with Antigravity.
Maintenance and quality: Cursor for anything involving large-scale refactoring, code review assistance, or keeping a growing codebase consistent as features are added.
Three tools, three different jobs. The overlap is real, but the edges don't compete — they complement.
For more on Antigravity's agent capabilities, the Antigravity and Figma MCP design workflow guide covers how to extend the agentic workflow into design handoff.
The Short Version
If you're deciding where to start and only want one tool:
- Fastest to first working app: Bolt
- Best for existing projects and teams: Cursor
- Best for end-to-end autonomous development: Antigravity
If your use case is long-term app development with real production requirements, Antigravity's agent loop and Google Cloud integration give it the most room to grow with you.
A Note on What These Tools Are Converging Toward
It's worth acknowledging that all three tools are actively closing the gaps between them. Cursor has added more agentic capabilities over the past year. Bolt has gotten better at handling larger, more complex projects. Antigravity continues expanding its IDE and editor integration.
Six months from now, the comparison will look different. The areas where they're converging fastest are multi-file context handling (Bolt and Antigravity catching up to Cursor) and speed to first output (Cursor and Antigravity catching up to Bolt).
What's less likely to converge quickly is the deep Google Cloud integration in Antigravity — that's architecture, not a feature. And Cursor's advantage on large existing codebases is tied to how it stores and retrieves project-wide context, which is also a fundamental design choice rather than a surface feature.
For pure speed of idea-to-app, Bolt's browser-based approach remains structurally fastest because there's no local environment to set up. That advantage doesn't go away regardless of other improvements.
Running Your Own Comparison
The most useful data point is your own. Pick one real project you're starting this week, build the first working version in each tool (or at least two of them), and compare the output you actually got versus what you expected.
The "which is better" question becomes much clearer when the project is real and the constraints — your tech stack, your team size, your timeline — are actual rather than hypothetical.
Context Window and File Handling
One practical difference that rarely shows up in comparison posts: how each tool handles large files and cross-file dependencies.
Antigravity's agent approach means it can read, modify, and create multiple files in a single session without hitting context limits in the traditional sense — the agent orchestrates work across files sequentially rather than loading everything simultaneously. The tradeoff is that the agent's decisions about what to read next depend on its understanding of what's needed, which is usually correct but occasionally misses a dependency.
Cursor's codebase indexing lets it answer questions about any file in the project without the file being currently open, and it handles cross-file refactors — renaming a function used in 40 files, for example — more reliably than the other two.
Bolt works best on single-page or minimal-file applications. Ask it to work on a project with 50+ files and the coherence of the output degrades noticeably. This is the ceiling that limits Bolt to prototype work.
For apps at the scale most indie developers build (under 50 files, 1-3 developers), all three tools handle the file management well enough that it's not a blocking concern. It only becomes the deciding factor at team scale or on legacy codebases.