Top AI coding & design tools in 2025

Every other day, a new Vibecoding tool emerges promising to revolutionize product design and development. But how many actually deliver value in real-world scenarios?

Over the past month, product development teams at Aubergine rigorously tested vibecoding tools like Bolt.new, Cursor, Lovable.dev, Replit, and V0 across multiple production projects.

Here's our unfiltered verdict, including practical use cases, trade-offs, and a detailed comparison to help you navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

Top vibecoding tools for building digital products

1. Lovable.dev

Lovable.dev is a developer-focused platform that emphasizes building user-centered products through better UX, empathy, and product thinking. It offers a curated collection of tools and resources to help developers create software that truly resonates with users.

Ideal for

Lovable.dev shines when speed and presentation matter. It's perfect for stakeholder demos, allowing teams to spin up sleek, functional frontends in minutes.

It’s also a strong tool for early user flow validation, letting you test ideas without writing backend logic. For hackathons or MVPs, Lovable.dev works seamlessly with Supabase to create quick, data-driven prototypes with built-in authentication.

Pitfalls

However, Lovable.dev has limitations. It ties you to Supabase, which can be restrictive for teams needing a more flexible or enterprise-grade backend.

Additionally, once components are generated, tweaking or extending them can cause breakages, making iteration tricky. This rigidity can slow down development when projects move beyond prototyping.

Summary

Great for fast, polished prototypes and demos, but may not scale well for complex or evolving projects.

2. V0 (by Vercel)

V0 is an AI-powered design-to-code tool that instantly converts Figma designs into clean, production-ready React components. It streamlines the handoff between design and development, accelerating UI implementation.

Ideal for

V0 is built for speed, especially during design-to-code sprints. It effortlessly converts Figma frames into clean React code, making it a powerful asset for frontend teams.

It’s ideal for launching marketing pages quickly, often faster than traditional CMS platforms. V0 also supports low-code development for internal tools, like admin dashboards, especially when paired with Supabase.

Pitfalls

Despite its strengths, V0 comes with backend constraints. It tightly couples projects to Vercel and Supabase, offering little flexibility for teams with different infrastructure needs.

Additionally, customization options are limited; once your logic gets complex, V0 can become more of a bottleneck than a booster.

Summary

V0 is excellent for rapid frontend development and marketing sites, but its backend lock-in and limited flexibility may pose challenges for advanced use cases.

3. Cursor

Cursor is an AI-first code editor built on top of VS Code, designed to seamlessly integrate AI assistance into your development workflow. It helps developers write, refactor, and understand code faster with context-aware suggestions and inline explanations.

Ideal for

Cursor is ideal for serious engineering tasks. It excels at generating scalable backend APIs using tools like Prisma and MongoDB, making it suitable for enterprise-grade systems. It also shines in modernizing legacy codebases. AI-assisted suggestions help refactor and improve old code efficiently.

Developers building Flutter or React Native apps will appreciate Cursor’s ability to produce cross-platform UIs that account for platform-specific nuances.

Pitfalls

Despite its capabilities, Cursor can introduce friction. Debugging can be time-consuming, especially when issues such as dropped WebSocket connections or context loss occur. Additionally, AI-generated code still requires human oversight—especially in security-sensitive environments—so you can’t fully “set and forget” it.

Summary

Cursor is a strong AI coding partner for full-stack and mobile development, but it demands experienced oversight to avoid costly bugs or security issues.

While Cursor remains a good choice, new tools like Windsurf, Cline, and VS Code’s own AI features have recently emerged and are gaining attention, making the landscape more competitive and worth keeping a close eye on.

4. Replit

Replit is a cloud-based AI-assisted development tool that lets you code, collaborate, and deploy applications directly from your browser. It supports real-time collaboration and comes with built-in hosting, making it easy to build and share projects instantly.

Ideal for

Replit is great for launching production-ready features without complex setup, think Stripe payments, PDF generation, or role-based access controls.

It's also a top choice for educators and learners, thanks to its AI-guided explanations that simplify coding concepts. For backend services, Replit allows you to deploy stable Node.js or Python APIs with minimal friction, making it ideal for small apps or teaching environments.

Pitfalls

However, Replit isn’t without drawbacks. Its UI output can feel dated and lacks the polish expected in modern apps.

And while it's affordable on a small scale, the frequent use of AI features (such as code generation) can become expensive quickly, with costs ranging from $40 to $50 per basic app.

Summary

Replit is a fast and flexible tool for lightweight production, but it may fall short in terms of UI quality and cost efficiency at scale.

5. Bolt.new

Bolt.new is a lightweight, browser-based coding tool designed for fast prototyping and experimentation. It enables developers to write and run code with minimal setup, handling tasks such as installing libraries and managing files directly in the browser.

Ideal for

Bolt.new is best suited for rapid prototyping, iterative coding, and lightweight development workflows. It works well for tasks like exploring APIs, building internal tools, or testing new libraries. While browser-based environments are increasingly common, Bolt.new stands out with its minimal friction and fast feedback loop, making it a solid choice when speed and simplicity matter more than full-stack depth.

Pitfalls

While it’s fast, Bolt.new’s generated code is often not production-ready. Expect to perform some refactoring if you plan to take projects beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Its feature set is also more limited than traditional IDEs or tools focused on enterprise-scale development.

Summary

Bolt.new is a useful playground for quick experiments and fast-moving ideas. For teams that need more control or local compute, its sibling product, Bolt.diy, offers a self-hosted, GPU-compatible option—but comes with a steeper setup curve.

Comparing the best AI Coding tools in 2025

With a flood of AI coding tools entering the market, it has become increasingly challenging for product teams to determine what is worth integrating. We’ve tested and tracked dozens of tools (including some new entries) across real-world projects and distilled our findings into this quick, high-level comparison.

Here are eight tools that stand out—and where each one currently falls short.

Each of these tools offers a unique value proposition, but none are without trade-offs. Cursor remains a leader for serious engineering tasks, while emerging players like Windsurf, Cline, and VS Code AI are becoming increasingly competitive in day-to-day workflows.

Our recommendation? Choose based on what you need most today, then revisit as the ecosystem evolves.

The winning strategy

Building a digital product is a journey, and no single AI tool is suitable for every stage. The smartest teams align tools with the phases of product maturity:

Validation

Use Lovable.dev, V0, and even Cline to rapidly prototype ideas, test user flows, and build functional demos. These tools enable visual experimentation and basic interactivity in hours, not weeks, ideal for investor pitches, user testing, or early internal buy-in.

Scale

As the product matures and technical demands increase, transition to tools like Cursor, Replit, or VS Code AI. These support more complex logic, secure API integrations, and production-grade systems. Windsurf can also serve as a lightweight AI co-pilot for day-to-day engineering tasks within VS Code.

Optimization

No AI tool replaces critical human review. Before launch, manually audit your product for security, compliance, performance, and edge cases, especially in regulated or user-sensitive domains. AI can help accelerate the process, but the final responsibility remains with your team.

Final thoughts

AI tools are like power tools: incredibly useful when used correctly, but dangerous when misapplied. You wouldn’t use a hammer on a screw and in the same way, you shouldn’t expect a demo tool to carry your backend.

Choose wisely, build strategically. Your tool stack is a reflection of how your team solves problems, moves fast, and scales smart.

At Aubergine, we’ve seen firsthand that successful AI integration aligns very closely with engineering outcomes. That’s why we created ExcellerAIte, our AI-first product design and development framework.

With ExcellerAIte, we:

• Utilize AI tools for functional prototyping and rapid validation, ensuring ideas are tested before significant investments are made.
  
• Act as AI orchestrators, combining prompting, architecture design, and code quality assurance to guide AI output, not blindly accept it.
  
• Maintain a strict standard of quality, even when working at a rapid pace, with proven workarounds for the current limitations of AI-generated code and design.
  

This means features that once took weeks can be delivered in days. More importantly, product teams can make smarter bets, faster, without compromising stability or security.

If you're building something ambitious, AI can be a force multiplier—but only if used with intent and expertise. That’s where we come in. From tool selection to full-system delivery, we partner with forward-thinking teams to ship products that are AI-enabled and product-ready.

Have a product vision? Let’s turn it into a launch plan.

Explore our AI development services and contact us today to talk to our AI experts.