Lovable vs Cursor: pros & cons

Discussion
1

Hello,

Any Lovable users here? Could you share pros and cons of Lovable vs Cursor?

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I am!

Pros of Loveable:

  • Direct preview of the website with mobile mode and select elements directly and easier reference

  • Fix error button (free of charge)

  • No need to know the programmatical terms to let the AI know what you are asking for (but not always)

  • The chat mode and coding mode are separated, which means you don’t have to tell the AI when to not code

  • Precise vision with the colors and design, layout when given image as reference

  • Able to use uploaded images directly (previously you had to go through GitHub, still have to go through GitHub for audio and videos)

  • Native Supabase integration (simplified backend)

  • Can host directly (Not fully custom domain, the domain ends with loveable)

  • Works for all devices, low-end computers friendly (even on mobile! But not recommended)

Cons of Loveable:

  • Expensive (not budget friendly, 5 uses daily, 250 uses monthly minimum), free version is very limited (can only use it for 5 prompts per day)

  • Experimental/beta/alpha features are only for $200 plan users

  • Projects are private only for paid users, free users have their projects public which can be seen by everyone even guests who don’t have an account

  • AI can get into the loop if you don’t know what you are doing and what is coding

  • Supabase can be very confusing and limiting for large projects (e.x. social media, cloud services, etc… even with pro plan on Supabase, you still limited for very limiting amount of storage, self hosted version is not natively supported which can be even more complex)

  • Does not crawl the web nor using the web generally, does not use docs easily

  • Hosting the website using fully custom domain and provider can be difficult when not guided properly, especially for devs

  • Does not code actual apps, only web apps/websites

  • Source code cannot be viewed or downloaded directly, must use GitHub which can be somewhat difficult to non tech users

  • Can only code React.js and only TypeScript, JavaScript has been removed

  • Cannot customize the theme of the chat

  • It’s web based only which can be performance issue

  • Lacks of documented syntax, only the AI knows which can be clueless when debugging

Pros of Cursor:

  • Very tweakable AI through prompts or cursorrules

  • Various models (can bring own API key to use more models from different providers other than just OpenAI but can be a bit pricey, not as pricey as Cline and Aider though)

  • Can code anything, able to use various frameworks and languages, websites, web apps, actual apps, mobile apps, especially when using @web to crawl and search the web and @docs for the desired language as it can crawl and index docs

  • Very cheap and budget friendly ($20 a month for 500 fast use of various models, then unlimited slow use of various models, intelligence does not change, only speed)

  • Can do automation when using agent mode in composer like running commands and editing multiple files at once, automatically debugs using linter

  • Can use chat mode for plans or composer normal mode or composer agent mode for all-in-one solution

  • Can deeply read and analyze everything, including the terminal

  • It is based on Visual Studio Code which is very friendly user and familiar to devs as it has a lot of useful extensions

  • The source code is direct and can be directly manually edited, no GitHub required

  • Direct terminal access whenever its PowerShell or the regular command line, which allows you to always have up-to-date packages by running the command “npm i the name of the package” for example

  • Has easy to access and use Notepads feature for extra knowledge or rule(s)

  • Experimental/Beta/Alpha features are always available for new and old users, free and pro users

  • Has pre-indexed docs

  • Easy simple drag and drop direct upload of various files as it can be directly modified through your operating system directory (but needs to be referenced properly)

  • Customizable IDE along with the chat by using themes and icons from marketplace

  • It’s native IDE app which is great for performance

  • Well documented syntax which helps the AI to know where and what to debug

  • Cursor Tabs is very fast prediction mode and very fast corrector

  • Apply model is very fast

Cons of Cursor:

  • Limited Window Context (10-20K, but with all honesty it does not really impact the performance of the AI and can still perform well)

  • AI can go through a loop when not prompted well as you need to use some programmatical terms (using XML tags sometimes helps but not always, using natural English still works like how it works with Loveable)

  • A bit older version of VSCode (1.93, but still performs well)

  • Apply model sometimes messes up and deletes half the code or comments “the rest of the code remains the same”

  • Can not handle too many lines (this is more of a LLM limitation, which means you have to refactor the files)

  • Not direct preview for websites (needs to open a browser)

  • Interface can run through visual bugs sometimes

  • Enabling Shadow Workspace mode can consume too much RAM

  • Can be heavy for low-end computers (this is more of VSCode issue)

  • The AI can hallucinate and mess up or forget some of the context including the path of the project and start working out of the project (to solve this is to create new chat/composer, and perhaps you have to give the main/basic context of your codebase otherwise it will not know what to do)

Conclusion, in my opinion as developer, I say Cursor is great choice for all-in-one solution while Loveable is just for small web projects

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Really great answer! Thanks a ton!

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You very welcome!

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Your comparison is very comprehensive, very good, thank you.

6

Here’s a little secret for the folks who don’t know.
I don’t know lovable’s story but I can say their product felt clunky compared to bolt.new by Stackblitz. Given the use case of the product, I just wasn’t in the same place with the app as I would be with v0 and bolt.new.

Here’s the dope part though:
bolt.new is open sourced by Stackblitz and there’s an active community that’s been working on bolt.diy for some time now.

Best part is you can use Gemini or deepseek or whatever you want on it and you can update it however you want including system prompt since it’s open source.

It’s a little bit less polished than the production app but they are easy to work around.

That being said
Nothing comes close to Cursor agent at this moment IMO. As someone who’s prompted coming up on 8 billion tokens or so I think its better to use Cursor.

Lots of people putting in good features in there to bring it to feature parity, but there’s also a LOT that Bolt.new doesn’t have.