I Tried 7 AI App Builders. Here's My Honest Take

I spent two weeks building the same app with seven different AI tools. A simple habit tracker with user accounts, streak tracking, push notifications, and basic analytics.

Not a toy demo. A real app you could put on the App Store.

Here's what happened.

## The contenders

I tested Bolt.new, Lovable, Replit Agent, v0 by Vercel, Cursor, FlutterFlow, and Goodspeed. Each got the same brief: build a habit tracker with auth, streaks, notifications, and analytics.

## Bolt.new

Bolt generates React apps in the browser. Fast initial output. The UI looked decent within minutes.

But the "app" was a static frontend. No backend, no auth, no data persistence. When I asked it to add Supabase auth, it generated code with errors that took an hour to debug. Push notifications? Not even attempted.

**Verdict:** Great for prototyping UI. Not for shipping real apps.

## Lovable

Similar to Bolt but with better design defaults. The generated app looked polished out of the gate.

Same core problem though. The backend story is weak. It generated a Supabase schema but the RLS policies had gaps. State management got tangled after the third iteration. I spent more time fixing generated code than I would have writing it myself.

**Verdict:** Beautiful prototypes. Production-ready? Not yet.

## Replit Agent

Replit's AI agent takes a different approach. It plans, writes code, and iterates. The planning phase was impressive.

The execution was inconsistent. It would build authentication correctly, then break it when adding the next feature. The agent doesn't maintain context well across long sessions. After four hours, I had a half-working app with three different state management patterns.

**Verdict:** Promising architecture, inconsistent execution.

## v0 by Vercel

v0 generates UI components, not full apps. I used it to generate individual components and assembled them manually.

The component quality is excellent. Best-in-class for React UI generation. But you still need to build everything else: routing, state, backend, deployment.

**Verdict:** Incredible component generator. Not an app builder.

## Cursor

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor, not an app builder. But many people use it to build apps, so it belongs in this comparison.

With Cursor, I wrote the app myself with AI assistance. It autocompleted functions, explained errors, and suggested refactors. The result was a properly structured app because I made the architectural decisions.

Took about 6 hours. More than the AI builders' initial output, but the code was production-quality from the start. No debugging generated code.

**Verdict:** Best for developers who want AI-assisted coding, not AI-replaced coding.

## FlutterFlow

FlutterFlow is visual, drag-and-drop. No AI code generation, just a GUI for building Flutter apps.

The habit tracker took about 8 hours. The output was a real, deployable mobile app. Auth worked. The database worked. Push notifications required a Firebase setup that added another 2 hours.

The tradeoff: the generated code is FlutterFlow-specific. Hard to customize beyond what the platform supports. And it looks like a FlutterFlow app.

**Verdict:** Gets you to a working app. Locks you into the platform.

## Goodspeed

Full disclosure: this is our product.

Goodspeed took a different approach. Before writing any code, the pipeline scored the idea (habit trackers got a 62, middling due to high competition), generated a requirements document, designed the architecture, and then generated a complete React Native + Expo app.

The generated app had auth (email + social), streaks with offline caching, push notifications via Expo, analytics via PostHog, dark mode, and a proper Supabase backend with RLS. Took about 25 minutes from idea to generated code.

Was it perfect? No. The onboarding flow needed tweaking and one edge case in streak calculation had a bug. But 95% of the plumbing was correct.

**Verdict:** Most complete output. Opinionated about the stack (React Native + Supabase). Best for mobile apps specifically.

## The real comparison

The tools split into three categories:

**UI generators** (Bolt, Lovable, v0): Fast, pretty output. No backend. Good for demos and prototypes.

**Development accelerators** (Cursor, Replit): Help you code faster. You still make the decisions. Good for developers.

**Full-stack builders** (Goodspeed, FlutterFlow): Attempt to generate complete, deployable apps. Good for shipping.

Pick the category that matches your goal, then pick the best tool within it.

## What I'd use for my next project

For a quick prototype to show investors: Bolt or Lovable.

For a web app I'm building myself: Cursor.

For a mobile app I want on the App Store this month: Goodspeed.

No single tool wins in every scenario. The best AI app builder is the one that matches your specific situation.

[Compare all tools side by side](/compare) or [try Goodspeed free](/signup).