Bolt.new vs Bubble

Bolt.new is an AI app builder from StackBlitz, the San Francisco company founded in 2017 whose WebContainers technology runs Node.js entirely inside the browser. Bolt launched in October 2024, grew to an estimated $40 million in annual recurring revenue within months, and in January 2025 StackBlitz raised a $105.5 million Series B led by Emergence Capital and GV. Its core job: you describe an app, website or prototype in chat, and Bolt writes the code, runs it live in the browser and deploys it.

Bolt Cloud adds hosting, unlimited databases, authentication, custom domains and analytics, so small apps can ship without leaving the product. You can start from Figma, a GitHub repo or a template, connect Stripe for payments, and build mobile apps through Expo. Pricing is token-based: the free plan gives 1 million tokens a month with a 300,000 daily cap, Pro gives 10 million tokens with rollover and removes Bolt branding, Teams adds admin controls and shared capacity, and Enterprise is billed by consumption.

Bolt fits founders, designers and developers who want a working prototype or MVP in hours with real, exportable code. It is weaker on large, long-lived codebases: token usage grows with project size, and debugging loops can burn through allowances. Lovable and Replit target the same audience, Bubble and FlutterFlow are visual builders with their own runtime, and Softr fits simple internal tools.

Buying tip: start on the free plan to judge how fast your project consumes tokens; heavy users should take Pro annual, where unused tokens roll over.

Bubble is a no-code platform for building full web applications, developed by Bubble Group in New York since 2012. It combines a visual drag-and-drop editor for responsive pages, a built-in database with privacy rules, a workflow engine for application logic, user authentication and hosting, so a founder can ship a marketplace, SaaS or internal app without writing traditional code. A plugin marketplace and the API Connector link it to Stripe, OpenAI and almost any REST service.

Plans are priced by capacity, measured in workload units, plus the number of editors and features such as custom domains, version control branches and API access. The free plan is for building and testing on a bubble.io subdomain; paid tiers add a custom domain, more workload, more collaborators and enterprise options such as dedicated hosting and SSO. Bubble also introduced a native mobile app builder and AI-assisted app generation, so one project can now target web, iOS and Android.

Bubble fits non-technical founders and agencies willing to invest weeks in learning a powerful tool. The trade-offs are a real learning curve, workload-based costs that are hard to forecast for data-heavy apps, performance and SEO that need care, and no code export, which means lock-in. Softr and Glide are faster for simple data apps, FlutterFlow suits mobile-first projects with code export, WeWeb pairs a visual frontend with your own backend, and Retool is better for internal tools.