Over the past six months I've run Antigravity, Cursor, and Bolt side by side on real projects. I started out assuming I'd just read a few comparison posts, pick the winner, and move on. What I learned instead is that almost every comparison piece I read led me astray when I tried to apply it to my own work.
Two tools with identical feature checklists behave completely differently in a fresh startup MVP versus a five-year-old iOS codebase versus a 3D game project. This article isn't about which tool wins on a scorecard. It's a framework for deciding which one is right for your project, plus the failures I hit when I got it wrong.
Three Reasons Spec Comparisons Mislead You
Let me get something embarrassing out of the way: I migrated tools twice in six months based on comparison articles, and both moves were wrong. The root cause was always the same — I was evaluating the tool, not my project.
First, identical features behave differently. "Multi-agent support" looks the same in a comparison table whether you're talking about Antigravity's parallel Workspace agents or Cursor's Composer running tasks in the background. In practice, they're completely different products. Antigravity forces you to design with role separation in mind, which is a huge win for large refactors. Cursor's Composer is more nimble for one-shot tasks. The cell with a checkmark hides where the actual differences live.
Second, public benchmarks rarely match your domain. A tool topping SWE-bench or HumanEval doesn't necessarily understand Swift + SwiftUI + CoreData well. On my own wallpaper app (CoreData + WidgetKit + StoreKit2), the benchmark leader for web stacks lost decisively to a tool ranked third overall. Training data bias is invisible in the headline scores.
Third, your brain matters. I'm a keyboard-first developer, so Cursor's cmd+K and cmd+L rhythm clicks for me. A friend of mine thinks more visually, and Bolt's preview-driven loop is dramatically faster for them. The same tool gets called "perfect" and "unusable" by different developers, and most of that variance is the evaluator, not the tool.
Once you internalize these three points, "which one is best overall" becomes almost meaningless as a question.
A Five-Axis Project Framework
Here's the framework I now use to make the call in about five minutes when a new project lands.
Axis one is codebase maturity. Are you starting from zero, sitting at five thousand lines, or maintaining fifty thousand? Bolt is incredible at zero-to-something. It's nearly useless dropped onto a fifty-thousand-line legacy codebase.
Axis two is target environment. For Web/Next.js, all three are viable. For native mobile (especially Swift or Kotlin), it's Antigravity or Cursor. For 3D games (Unreal/Unity), Antigravity is currently the only realistic answer.
Axis three is parallelism need. Projects where you can naturally split work across agents — frontend, backend, tests — get a real boost from Antigravity's Workspace model. Sequential, single-developer work doesn't benefit and is often slowed down by it.
Axis four is your experience level. Bolt is best when you're happy delegating most decisions. Cursor is "you with training wheels." Antigravity is "you running alongside teammates." If you want to write the code yourself, the more autonomous tools become friction.
Axis five is budget, but not the headline price. The hidden costs (covered later) often dominate the comparison.
Run a project through these five axes and the answer usually emerges mechanically. "Native iOS, 5 years old, no parallelism need, want to write the code, ¥3,000 budget" → Cursor. Done.
Each Tool's Real Strength and Real Weakness
Setting feature lists aside, here's what six months of daily use taught me.
Antigravity's real strength is forced role separation. Workspaces naturally pull apart Planner, Coder, and Reviewer responsibilities, and that structure shows up in maintainability later. I now run separate workspaces for "feature work," "refactoring," and "test additions," and the pattern of "moving on while something is broken" has nearly disappeared from my projects. Its weakness is small one-off tasks. The Workspace startup cost dwarfs a five-minute script.
Cursor's real strength is staying out of your flow. cmd+K for local edits, cmd+L for global questions — that round trip is so low-friction it preserves flow state. I reach for Cursor for sloppy refactors and "rewrite just this method" tasks. Its weakness is large-scale, multi-file rewrites. Composer helps, but it can't match Antigravity's parallel agents at scale.
Bolt's real strength is shortest distance from idea to prototype. A prompt produces a live preview in seconds, and you can iterate by clicking on the UI. For MVP validation and client demos, nothing else is close. Its weakness is long-term maintainability. There's a deep gap between "it runs" and "I can maintain this," and Bolt output usually requires substantial rewrites to cross it.
Case Study 1: A Two-Week Startup MVP
A friend's startup needed an MVP demo in two weeks. Web, Next.js, Supabase, Stripe — auth, payments, admin panel, the works.
Bolt was the obvious first call. The framework + service combination is exactly where it shines. By the end of day one, an authed landing page was live. By day three, Stripe Checkout was working.
Then day five hit a wall. Supabase RLS policies got complex enough that Bolt couldn't keep a coherent design — table A and table B started using contradictory permission models in code generated minutes apart. I switched gears: kept the Bolt output as the scaffold, opened it in Cursor, and rewrote the RLS layer by hand.
Two lessons. First, Bolt is unbeatable at "zero to thirty percent" but you'll need a different tool to finish. Second, you can cut the migration cost by more than half if you prompt Bolt up front to use a folder structure and naming convention that matches what your follow-up tool expects.
I didn't reach for Antigravity here because the project's bottleneck was prototyping speed, not parallelism. Two weeks isn't enough time for the Workspace setup to pay back.
Case Study 2: Adding to a 40k-Line React Native App (a Failure)
This is the embarrassing one. I needed to add an AI chat screen to a three-year-old React Native app, around 40,000 lines. I picked Antigravity. I switched back to Cursor on day three.
Two reasons.
The first was that Antigravity's Workspace model struggles to respect a codebase's "implicit conventions." The forced role separation that pays off on greenfield work becomes noise when you graft it onto an existing project. My codebase used Zustand instead of Redux and had a homemade naming convention for helper functions. Antigravity's agents kept proposing "more idiomatic" alternatives, and I had to re-explain the project's conventions almost every interaction.
The second was the cost of state sharing between agents. Parallelism pays when responsibilities cleanly separate (which is true for new projects). On legacy integration, the overhead of teaching each agent the project's "common sense" outweighed the parallel speedup.
Cursor immediately fit the project, and the AI chat screen shipped in half the time I'd budgeted.
The lesson: a tool's strength can become its weakness depending on context. "Parallelism" and "forced role separation" are weapons in greenfield development. They become friction in legacy integration.
Case Study 3: Game Development with Unreal Engine 5
An indie game developer friend and I tested Antigravity with Unreal Engine 5, building NPC AI behavior and procedural level generation.
Antigravity was the only realistic choice. Cursor and Bolt have very little training context for the Blueprint + C++ hybrid that defines UE5 work. Antigravity's Google-side 3D pipeline integration is well ahead of the others, and the ability to split a Workspace into a "Blueprint agent" and a "C++ agent" was exactly the right shape.
Concretely: NPC state machines lived in Blueprint, low-level optimization in C++, and each agent could speak its language fluently. That's structurally hard to achieve in a single-context tool like Cursor.
One caveat. Antigravity's UE5 integration has been improving fast over the past six months, but it's still plugin-dependent and sometimes lags behind UE5 version bumps. For commercial projects, plan to actively monitor plugin release notes.
The Hidden Costs the Pricing Pages Don't Show
Headline pricing makes the three tools look comparable. Real-world costs diverge once you operate them at scale.
Antigravity's hidden cost is parallel-execution quota burn. Running four agents in parallel consumes API quota at four times the rate of a sequential workflow. "Unlimited" plans usually assume human typing speed, not agent parallelism, and you'll need a higher tier sooner than you expect.
Cursor's hidden cost is premium-model surcharges. The base plan is genuinely good, but heavy use of long-context or top-tier models (especially Opus-class) racks up overage charges. I've watched a planned $20/month bill quietly become $50+ several months in a row.
Bolt's hidden cost is the rewrite labor. You have to budget human time to bring Bolt output to production quality. My own rough rule: expect to rewrite roughly the same number of lines Bolt generated when shipping the result.
The honest comparison is "cost per shipped feature," not subscription price. That number only emerges from your own project history.
Signals That Say "Switch Tools Now"
After six months running all three in parallel, the signals to switch became surprisingly clear.
Antigravity → Cursor: when Workspace setup time starts exceeding task duration. If three of your last five tasks were "I spent fifteen minutes spinning up agents to save five minutes," your task granularity has shrunk and Cursor is the better fit for now.
Cursor → Antigravity: when the codebase has crossed the threshold where parallelism is essential. My empirical line is around 20,000 lines plus multiple independent subsystems (frontend, backend, mobile). Below that, Cursor wins on overhead. Above it, Antigravity wins on throughput.
Bolt graduation is the easiest to spot. Look at your last week. If "Bolt output used directly" hasn't happened in seven days and "Bolt output rewritten in Cursor" has become routine, Bolt has finished its job for this project.
Where I've Landed
Here's my honest current configuration.
Default playbook: first three days of a new project on Bolt for prototyping, then Cursor as the codebase forms, then Antigravity when scale demands parallelism. It's less "switch tools" than "rotate the lead tool by project phase."
Yes, I subscribe to all three. Total monthly cost is roughly ¥10,000, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the time savings. At my hourly rate, two hours saved per month covers the bill. I'm reliably getting more than twenty hours back. The ROI math is comfortable.
If you're reading this still unsure, my single piece of advice: spend two weeks with Bolt building something close to what you actually want to ship. The prototype will surface what you struggle with, and the next tool decision becomes obvious.
Tools are not the goal. Shipping your project is. Use this framework to make the choice in five minutes and get back to building.