I wanted to compare V0 and Replit, which are both tools that you can use to create software in a browser IDE environment, via an AI chat bot, which will also deploy your code for you to a URL. This post compares my experience with each for the same task. I used the desktop version of each, though both have mobile apps (v0 only for Apple, not Android).
Example Project
The prompt given to each was:
create an app that uses the spotify api to get a song, when given a voice command to get a song of a faster or slower tempo than the current song
The reason I used Spotify is that it does provide the tempo of a song, whereas SoundCloud for example does not - see my other post comparing the two APIs.
I also kept the prompt pretty vague, so wanted to see how it would fill in the gaps - for example, was there an an initial song, and how would it get songs?
The process, after entering the prompt in to each one:
| Replit | V0 | |
|---|---|---|
| prompt process | no questions throughout | had optoins to choose from while prompting, explained that some Spotify endpoints were deprecated and provided alternative |
| stack | Express, React, Vite, PostgreSQL, Tailwind, shadcn\ui | Next.js, React, Tailwind, shadcn/ui |
| name of app | Tempo Tuner then TempoShift | Tempo DJ for project, Spotify song finder for code project |
| does it work | yes. needed to remove deprecated api call after more prompts | UI works, but not everything |
| model | Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet | often Claude-based, uses Vercel API |
| monitoring | On the console only in an IDE tab, I think | Logs and deployment info on vercel.com page |
Both the voice recognition parts work - and use the browser's native Web Speech API, so no extra library needed. The sound is usually processed on the cloud, rather than on device, for example for chrome.
v0 UI
Replit UI
From a product point of view, for the first pass of each app:
- v0 has a search bar which I didn't ask for but like
- Replit has buttons as a fallback for the mic which are nice
- Replit also has tiles for the next song depending on what you last did - but I had to fix it to work via prompts as initially it showed the same song
More Generally
Of note is that v0 is known for making UIs - and comparing the two more generally, not just for this project:
| Replit | V0 | |
|---|---|---|
| deployment | IDE that deploys | creates code but need vercel to deploy |
| usual stack | many languages and frameworks | React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, does not typically create backend code - you add Next.js routes, external db services, serverless functions etc |
To note is that:
- Vercel also created Next.js.
- The use of Tailwind CSS and shadcn makes sense for AI - shadcn/ui allows you to edit component code rather than use a library, and tailwind makes styling composable text which AI is good at
- I asked replit to create a fitbit watch face - which requires a very certain stack, the fitbit sdk - and it simply said it would make me a web app for this, which was disappointing. For this, things which assist coding, rather than generate entire apps, are better, such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot etc.