spent a weekend rebuilding the same crud app in Lovable, bolt, and v0. honest take on what each is actually for.
the app: a small inventory tracker. login, supabase backend, 3 tables, a dashboard with filters, a
detail view, a form. nothing fancy.
i built the same spec in all three on saturday and sunday. timed each one. here are my notes.
lovable: about 2 hours 40 minutes. the most polished output by far. supabase integration was
the cleanest, auth worked first try, the visual polish on the dashboard was honestly better than
what i would have written by hand. ate 64 credits.
bolt: about 1 hour 50 minutes. faster to v0 but the styling needed more cleanup. supabase
wiring was clunky, i had to manually edit a few things. easier to download and run locally
though.
v0: about 3 hours 20 minutes including time spent fighting with the deployment. great for
components in isolation, harder to think of as a full app builder. i think im using it wrong.
what each is actually for, imo:
lovable wants to be the place you ship. the workflow assumes you are going to stay. the
deployment, auth, db, billing layer is all there. cost: you are paying credits and you live in the
platform.
bolt wants to be the place you scaffold. cleaner export, more dev-first feel, less hand holding.
cost: you do more wiring yourself.
v0 wants to be the place you generate the UI. it is not really competing with the other two for the
same use case.
contrarian take: most of the "should i use X or Y" discourse on this sub is dumb because the
three tools are not the same product. lovable is a vertical app platform. bolt is a faster
scaffolding tool. v0 is a component generator.
pick by what you actually want to do.
if you want to ship a real saas product and not think about devops, lovable, yes for now, with the
migration caveats other people have written about.if you want to ship a real saas product and have someone audit the code in 6 months, bolt or a
manual stack.
if you want to ship marketing pages or design system pieces, v0.
ok i should go to sleep. 11:24pm and ive been at the laptop since 7.