The Definitive Tier List of AI App Building Tools for 2025 |

If you've got an idea for an app and you're thinking about building it, you've probably seen there are a vast number of different AI tools out there to use. And so today, this article will take you through a definitive tier list of all of the best AI tools to start building your app today so that you can turn your idea into a reality and launch your idea to the world. For over a decade, many experts have been designing apps and advising startups on product and design, and it's clear the next wave of incredible businesses is going to be built using these AI tools. And so let's dive straight into the tier list of the top AI app building tools that you can use today.

The Shifting Landscape of AI App Development

If you wanted to build your AI app just a short while ago, you would have had only a couple of different options. It was pretty much just Lovable or Bolt.new. But a few months later, here we are, and we've got numerous different tools to build AI apps with. And so it can be hard to know exactly the best place to start, depending on what type of app that you want to build. A lot of people get started with Lovable or Bolt and then sometimes you can realize that maybe it's not the best platform to build your app in. You have to sync your code to GitHub, get it out, you try using a different tool, or maybe you find that actually using an all-in-one platform might be better.

This article will take you through all of these AI app building tools and categorize them by the best for all of these different categories: enterprise apps, consumer apps, complex apps, native apps, best for design, and best for internal or personal apps. First, we'll put them on the tier list so you can see which tools are good and which tools are bad, and then look at which tools you might want to use depending on the type of app that you want to build.

The Definitive AI App Builder Tier List

Here is a ranking and rating of all of these AI app building tools, based on extensive experience with all of these platforms.

S Tier

Lovable: Lovable is so user-friendly and so easy to get started with. It has all of the tools in there to integrate with almost like as a one-click integration. You just click to integrate Superbase. You click to set up to sync with GitHub. You can sync it with GitHub, work on your codebase separately, and come back to Lovable, and it will actually update that with you. They're building a bunch of new features, and their agent is really, really powerful. If you're just getting started building with apps, Lovable is a really, really great starting point. It's one of the best tools for allowing that flexibility of being able to go back and forth between different platforms.
Leap: Leap is one of the best tools on the market for building apps right now. If you're okay with a little bit more technical overhead, with learning a little bit more technical stuff, then Leap is hugely recommended. It has one of the most accurate prompts to app building workflows that has been seen and used. Very similar to Lovable, and highly recommended for more enterprise, commercial, and full-stack applications over something like a Lovable or Bolt.
Tempo: Tempo is a great platform for its specific use case. It has a super strong tool which is kind of going under the radar at the moment, but really works. This tool could work super well if you're design-focused and want to build the front end and the basic functionality for your app to start. Or if you're a designer and you want to actually bring in your codebase, which you can do on the tool, and start designing in it, then push the code back to GitHub. There's a huge amount of value in this platform.

A Tier

Replet: Replet is an all-in-one app building platform that includes a bunch of stuff out of the box. Their agent is really, really powerful. The interface is excellent and helps you use the agent to build your app. It has a database and authentication built-in, making it a really well-rounded tool with a ton of features. Replet is a great option for building internal or personal apps because it has all of that stuff built out of the box, but it also allows for more detailed control.
Cursor: Cursor is incredibly powerful and flexible. It's good at doing so many things, but it is definitely for the more technically minded. You can run any coding agent in the terminal and it gives you really direct control over your codebase. They've recently released BugBot, which allows you to review and fix any changes, bugs, or issues in your code as you go. It is a bit expensive, but it's a great option if you're more technically minded and want to build everything from scratch.
Bolt.new: Bolt fits into the same category as Lovable where it's a flexible, more front-end focused app builder and it gives you integrations to Superbase and GitHub out of the box. However, the actual build quality of Bolt is not as good as Lovable. Some of the integrations don't work as nicely as they do with Lovable, for Superbase primarily and for other tools. It's a really good and powerful tool, close behind Lovable.
Devon: Devon is an incredibly powerful platform for more enterprise and organization-focused AI coding. It's much more designed for enterprise and team-based development workflows. If you are working on a team with multiple developers and want to integrate AI coding, Devon is a really good option. It does a huge amount of documentation behind the scenes, maps out your architecture, and connects directly to Linear for issue tracking.
Polymat: Polymat is a great platform for its very specific use case. It really tailors to team-based product design workflows really well and helps bridge that gap between product design, product management, and development. It has helped a ton of product managers and product designers prototype really strong user journeys and user flows.
V0: V0 does what it does incredibly well, and a ton of people use it and get great value out of it. It's great for getting something decent in one prompt or in a few prompts. It's really good to quickly prototype ideas and see what something will look like. It's very much just front end. The model they're using for prompts to code and design is really, really strong.

B Tier

Orchids: Orchids is a more specifically design-tailored front-end AI app building tool. The design that you will get using Orchids is generally quite a lot better than what you would get in something like Bolt just by typing a prompt. However, it does lack some of the features that other front-end specific platforms have, although the design quality is actually better in a lot of instances.
Mocha: Mocker is a slightly better tool, slightly more accurate than something like Base 44. It's an all-in-one app building tool, more in the Lovable and Bolt style space but with a few of the other integrations built out of the box like authentication and database. There are a lot of areas that Mocker can improve, and it is a very straightforward app for a very singular purpose at the moment.
Emergent: Emergent is a very solid, technically minded platform with a very strong foundation. It's an all-in-one platform that is more in line with Leap, for more technically minded founders. It connects directly to GitHub and will test all of the functionality as it's building it. It's a really good option if you don't get along with something like Leap and are looking for a more technical full-stack app building application.
Aura: Aura is a great platform, but it does have a very super-specific use case that is only going to be relevant for a certain amount of people. It's a more design-focused tool with a massive library of design and component templates. It's great for prototyping components and UI, but outside of that, not many people will find a benefit from using it.

C Tier

Base 44: This is not a tool that would be used particularly, but it definitely is right for some people, and they're sure to improve their agent ability over time. It's an all-in-one platform that felt a little bit unpolished. The experience with building using the agent felt a bit hit and miss. It's a good starting point if you're just trying to get started with app building, but not recommended for consumer apps.
Ror: There's still a way to go to get the platform up to the point where you can build more in-depth apps for iOS and Android. It's a native iOS app builder with a very clear use case. However, native apps in AI app building tools is not something that has been done particularly well yet. You probably will have to take that code out of Ror at some point and put it into a more technical tool like Cursor or Xcode to finish building your app.
Vibe Code: Vibe Code has a lot of potential, but for now, it's in this C category. It's a native iOS app building tool that allows you to build native apps directly on your phone using natural language. However, it doesn't have a clear vision for what it's trying to achieve yet. It's kind of straddling two worlds where it doesn't quite work for either of them.

Best Tools by Category

If you have an idea for an app that's really specific or falls into any of these categories, here's a breakdown of which tool works best for what type of use.

Best for Internal or Personal Apps

The best platform for this is Replet. Replet gives you a huge amount of control. Their agent is really, really powerful. They're building a tool where their mission is to help non-technical people build great apps and build all of these things into their platform without needing all these third-party integrations. It's the most well-rounded and mature tool to use for this use case.

Best for Simple Consumer Apps

Lovable is the one to go with here. Lovable is great for getting something up and running really quickly. It's really accurate. It connects into all of these third-party tools. You can integrate your database, authentication, and GitHub really, really easily. It will connect with Polar or Stripe. It gives you the most flexibility for moving into different tools in the future if you do want to take that outside of Lovable and go somewhere else.

Best for Enterprise Apps

The best one for enterprise apps at the moment here is Devon. That gives you the most control over how your agents are coding. It gives you connectivity directly to Linear, so you can assign Devon to do actual issues, bugs, and features that you are documenting in Linear. It gives you the most amount of documentation and research and in-depth kind of thinking before it actually builds anything in your codebase. It's also the best platform for collaborating across multiple developers within a team.

Best for Complex Consumer Apps

For complex consumer apps, Leap is recommended. Leap is the favorite tool for more complex consumer apps. It allows you to deploy to the AWS cloud or the Google cloud. The agent is incredibly powerful in Leap, and there's a ton of more technically focused features. If you're building a more complicated full-stack consumer app, Leap is a great choice. It also works really well for Teams, but Devon just pips them there in terms of features.

Best for Native Apps

At the moment, Cursor is still the best for native apps. The recommended workflow is setting up a new project in Xcode if you're building an iOS app, and then opening that project in Cursor. Then use something like Claude Code or the Cursor agent to build your project in Swift and see the preview in Xcode, rather than using any of the vibe coding tools for native apps at the moment. Nothing is quite there yet in terms of giving you enough control and detail.

Best for Design

The best for design for me at the moment is Tempo, with Polymat in a very, very close second. Tempo has so many features that are great for design, including outlining product requirements (the PRD), allowing you to click and edit directly on the code. It has the panel on the right for all of the properties that you can edit. It maps out all of the screens on a canvas for you and is building in integrations into Superbase, Polar, and other services.

Final Thoughts

So, that was the tier list for the top AI tools that you should be using today to build your AI app, broken down by the category of app that you're building as well. Hopefully, you can choose the right tool dependent on the type of app that you want to build and get started with a platform that's actually going to take you through to being able to launch your app and getting real customers.