v0

v0's pitch is narrow and it nails it: the best-looking, most keepable UI code of any prompt-to-app tool. Because it generates on shadcn/ui and Tailwind — the de facto stack of modern Next.js — the components it produces look like something a good frontend engineer wrote, TypeScript types and accessibility attributes included. Screenshot and Figma imports make it a genuine design-to-code bridge, and the one-click path to a live Vercel deployment is the fastest idea-to-URL loop in the category.

The weaknesses show up past the UI layer. Multi-step flows, backend logic, and data wiring drift or break in ways rivals like Lovable and Bolt handle more gracefully, and the credit meter punishes exactly the iteration that fixing those problems requires. Pricing has also crept upward: the current Plus plan is $30/user/month with no annual discount, and heavy sessions can burn through included credits quickly. The free plan's $5 of monthly credits is a real trial, not a workspace.

The under-appreciated angle is the Platform API: v0 is the only tool in this class that lets you embed its generation pipeline in your own product over REST, which makes it as much infrastructure as app.

Verdict: the default choice for UI prototyping and design-to-code, especially if you already live in the Next.js/Vercel ecosystem. Choose Lovable or Bolt if you want a whole working app without touching code, and a real editor like Cursor once logic outweighs layout.