HeyGen Alternatives 2026: 9 Tools for Training, Ads and Long Videos
HeyGen switched to credits in May 2026. Its $29 Creator plan buys 600 credits, about 12 to 150 minutes depending on the avatar model, and SCORM export starts at $149. Here are the alternatives, sorted by job.
Quick verdict: For training teams, Colossyan Professional costs $89 a month, or $59 billed yearly, and includes 5 SCORM exports a month. Synthesia suits companies that want data stored in the EU, Creatify suits UGC-style ads, and Revid suits faceless shorts. Stay with HeyGen for 4K on its $49 Pro plan and translation into 175 languages.
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Why teams look for a HeyGen alternative
The product turns a script into a presenter video, with 175 languages on paid plans; its pricing page claims 100,000+ business customers. A HeyGen avatar can be one of 700+ stock presenters on paid plans, a photo of you, or a digital twin that the Avatar V model builds from a 15-second video.
Prices checked on 7 October 2026, in US dollars. Yearly prices come from the pricing page’s FAQ (Creator) and its plan data (Business); for Pro it shows both $41 and $24.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly, per month | Monthly allowance | Longest video |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | – | 3 videos | 1 min |
| Creator | $29 | $24 | 600 credits | 30 min |
| Pro | $49 | Not confirmed | 1,000 credits | 30 min |
| Business | $149, plus $20 per extra seat | $119 | 1,500 credits | 60 min |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Contact sales | Not listed | No maximum |
Creator includes voice cloning; Pro adds 4K export; Business adds SCORM, quizzes, SAML/SSO and 5 custom video avatars. Free videos carry a watermark. Why teams look elsewhere:
- Credits instead of minutes. Since mid-May 2026, every feature draws on one credit balance, and a minute’s cost depends on the avatar model (table below). Unused monthly credits roll over for one month and are lost if you cancel.
- Training features start at $149. SCORM export, quizzes and branching come only with Business and Enterprise, plus $20 a month for each extra seat.
- A broad license to your content. The terms grant a royalty-free, irrevocable license to user content, “including to train or otherwise improve or modify” its AI models. Enterprise data is excluded by default; others can opt out by contacting the company.
- No refunds. Payments are non-refundable except where the law requires, and plans renew at the then-current price.
- Credit burn in reviews. Trustpilot shows 4.2 out of 5 from 4,693 reviews (21 October 2026). Five-star reviews from 6 and 7 October praise avatar quality and lip sync; one-star reviews from 1 and 6 October describe Pro credits gone within hours and the video agent rendering before a preview.
What Creator’s 600 credits buy at the published per-minute rates:
| Avatar model | Credits per minute | Minutes from 600 credits | Cost per minute at $29 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avatar III, video look | 4 | 150 | $0.19 |
| Avatar III, photo look | 7 | 85 | $0.34 |
| Avatar IV, photo look | 16 | 37 | $0.77 |
| Avatar IV, video look | 31 | 19 | $1.50 |
| Avatar V | 48 | 12 | $2.32 |
Our calculation from the help center’s credit rates, rounded down to whole minutes. Video translation with lip sync costs 6 or 10 credits a minute.
Prices, minutes and limits side by side
Entry paid plans, prices checked on 7 October 2026.
| Tool and plan | Monthly | Billed yearly, per month | Video included a month | Trustpilot, 7 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HeyGen Creator | $29 | $24 | 600 credits, about 12–150 min | 4.2 (4,693; 21 Oct) |
| Colossyan Professional | $89 | $59 | 30 min NEO + 10 min NEO2 | 4.0 (9) |
| Synthesia Starter | $29 | $18 | About 22 min | 3.8 (1,828) |
| Elai Creator | $29 | $23 | 15 min | 3.5 (105) |
| AI Studios Personal | $29 | $24 | Unlimited videos, up to 30 min each | 2.8 (228) |
| Creatify Starter | $39 | Not listed (up to 50% off) | 100 credits | 3.8 (835) |
| Revid Growth | $39 | $32 | 2,000 credits | 4.0 (304) |
| Tool and plan | Personal avatar | Languages | SCORM export | Longest video |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HeyGen Creator | Unlimited photo avatars, 1+ video avatar | 175 | From Business, $149 | 30 min |
| Colossyan Professional | 20 instant avatars | 120+; 87 for auto-translation | 5 a month | 30 min monthly, 50 min yearly |
| Synthesia Starter | 3 personal avatars | 140+; dubbing in 70+ | Enterprise only | No cap stated |
| Elai Creator | Selfie avatar, $199 a year extra | 75+ (page also says 100+) | Enterprise only | No cap stated; 15 min a month |
| AI Studios Personal | 3 custom avatars | 150+ | Enterprise only | 30 min |
| Creatify Starter | 3 custom avatars on Pro | 75+ | Not listed | 2 min |
| Revid Growth | Not listed | 70+ for voice-overs | Not listed | No cap stated |
Synthesia showed euros in our browser (€26 a month, €16 billed yearly) and US dollars to a direct request; the table uses dollars. On 21 October 2026 the page’s code also held a cheaper list for US visitors: Starter $19 a month, or $14 billed yearly; Pro $89, or $59. The Synthesia figures on this page use the list from our direct request. AI Studios’ rating is DeepBrain AI’s Trustpilot profile; Colossyan’s 9 reviews are too few to judge.
Per minute, the order changes. Billed monthly, Synthesia Starter costs about $1.32 a minute ($29 for about 22 minutes) and Colossyan Professional about $2.23 ($89 for 40 minutes; $1.48 billed yearly). Elai prints its own figure: $1.93 a minute, or $1.53 billed yearly. On HeyGen Creator, a minute costs from $0.19 on Avatar III to $2.32 on Avatar V.
HeyGen vs Synthesia: facts from both sides
Synthesia Ltd, based in London and founded in 2017, raised $200 million at a $4 billion valuation in January 2026. Both vendors bill in credits, call payments non-refundable and require consent from the person behind a personal avatar.
| Point | Synthesia | HeyGen |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Starter: $29, or $18 billed yearly ($19 and $14 in the US); about 22 min a month | Creator: $29, or $24 billed yearly; 600 credits |
| Next plan | Pro: $89, or $64 billed yearly ($59 in the US); up to about 60 min on top of 10 free | Pro: $49, yearly price not confirmed; 1,000 credits |
| Export | Full HD 1080p; no 4K on the pricing page | 1080p on Creator, 4K from Pro |
| Languages | 140+; dubbing in 70+ below Enterprise | 175 languages and dialects |
| SCORM and quizzes | Enterprise only | Business ($149) and Enterprise |
| Customer data | Stored in the EU (Ireland); ISO 42001, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II audits | Stored in the US on AWS; SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| Ratings, 7 Oct 2026 | Trustpilot 3.8 (1,828); G2 4.6 (2,820) | Trustpilot 4.2 (4,693; 21 Oct); G2 4.8 (1,973) |
Treat comparison pages as marketing. Synthesia cites a blind test it commissioned, in which people preferred its avatars 7 times out of 10, and its blog says the rival’s $29 plan makes about 13 minutes of video a month on its newer avatar models. HeyGen’s own comparison page says SCORM comes “starting from the free plan” and that Synthesia has no free tier; both vendors’ pricing pages contradict that.
Pick Synthesia if you want customer data stored in the EU, ISO 42001 and 27001 audits, or the cheaper yearly entry ($18 against $24). Pick HeyGen for 4K from $49, 175 languages and unlimited photo avatars. For budget SCORM, neither fits: one keeps it for Enterprise, the other for a $149 plan.
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Training and explainer videos: Colossyan and Elai
If videos go into a learning management system, SCORM export sets the price: Colossyan includes it on Professional, while HeyGen starts it at $149. Elai keeps SCORM for Enterprise but puts quizzes and branching on every plan. For narration without a presenter, see our Murf AI review.
Colossyan: SCORM on a self-serve plan
Founded in London in 2020, it is now headquartered in Budapest; the service contract is with Colossyan Inc. of Delaware. G2 shows 4.6 from 495 reviews; the Trustpilot score of 4.0 rests on just 9 (7 October 2026).
- Price and minutes: Professional costs $89 a month or $59 billed yearly, plus $45 or $30 per extra editor, up to 3 editors in all. Monthly, it includes 30 minutes on the NEO avatar model and 10 on NEO2, 5 streaming SCORM exports and 15 interactive videos, plus 20 instant avatars and 5 voice clones.
- Catch: minutes don’t roll over, and every regeneration deducts the full length again; translating a 60-second video into 10 languages uses 10 minutes. Extra minutes are sold only on yearly Professional: 600 NEO2 minutes for $1,500 a year.
- Trial and refunds: the 14-day trial needs no card but caps total video at 5 minutes, watermarked. Full refunds apply within 14 days if you generated under 10 minutes.
- Data: Colossyan says it doesn’t train AI models on customer content, a promise written into its Enterprise terms; the self-serve terms grant a broader license, including use “to improve the Services and relating technologies”.
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Elai: interactive explainers from $23 a month
Elai, owned by Panopto since October 2024, turns PowerPoint files, scripts or a web page into a video with an AI presenter. Branching, text quizzes, view analytics and one-click translation come with every plan.
- Price: Creator costs $29 a month or $23 billed yearly for 15 minutes of Full HD video a month. Team ($125, or $100 billed yearly) adds 4K, 50 minutes and 3 editors.
- Avatars: 80+ stock avatars on every plan. A selfie avatar recorded on a phone costs $199 a year extra, a studio avatar $500 and a voice clone $200.
- Catch: each render of the same video uses minutes again, and an extra minute costs $2. Payments are non-refundable, and SCORM export is Enterprise-only. Trustpilot: 3.5 from 105 reviews.
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Alternatives for UGC ads: Creatify, Arcads and TopView
Synthesia bars stock avatars from paid social ads without its written consent, and Colossyan bars them from voicing personal experiences as their own. HeyGen requires explicit consent from anyone whose likeness becomes a custom avatar.
Creatify: ad videos from a product link
Creatify makes video ads in an “authentic UGC or polished cinematic” style from a product URL or from scratch, and builds batches of variations at once. Against HeyGen, the difference is focus: its plans list ad templates and, on Pro, a tracker of 10 million+ competitor ads on Meta.
- Price: Starter costs $39 a month for 100 credits, 300 AI actors, 75+ languages and videos up to 2 minutes. Pro starts at $99 for 300 credits, 1,500 actors, 3 custom avatars and 10-minute videos. Yearly prices aren’t listed. Creatify replaced its $39 Starter plan in October 2026. On 21 October 2026, its pricing page showed Standard at $10 a month billed yearly for 55 credits, with $15 struck through, which we read as the monthly price, and Pro at $38 a month billed yearly for 280 credits, with $55 struck through. The figures above and the tables and charts on this page show the 7 October line-up.
- Free plan: 10 credits a month, about 2 video ads, with a watermark.
- Catch: AI regenerations use credits (manual edits are free), payments are non-refundable, and an annual plan can’t be changed until fewer than 10 credits remain. A one-star Trustpilot review from 5 October 2026 describes a $588 charge more than a year after cancelling. Rating: 3.8 from 835.
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Arcads and TopView: worth a look, with caveats
Arcads offers 1,000+ AI actors for talking-head ads and custom avatars, but publishes no prices; its /pricing address returns a 404 error. The review blog eesel.ai, citing reviewers who reached the in-app paywall, lists $110 a month for 10 videos and $220 for 20 (June 2026). One practical HeyGen vs Arcads difference: you can’t check Arcads prices before signing up. Trustpilot, 21 October 2026: 2.5 from 187 reviews, 49% one-star.
TopView, a generative video platform with avatar and UGC ad tools, showed Basic at $6.70 a month billed yearly ($80 a year, crossed-out $18) with 50 monthly credits on 7 October 2026. Avatar 4 videos stop at 180 seconds, and credit costs can change without notice. Trustpilot, 7 October 2026: 3.9 from 299 reviews.
Alternatives for long-form video
HeyGen allows 30 minutes on Creator and Pro, 60 on Business and no maximum on Enterprise; Avatar IV videos stop at 30 minutes on every paid plan.
- Colossyan: 20 minutes per video on free Starter, 30 on monthly Professional and 50 on yearly; a regeneration charges the full length again.
- AI Studios: Personal allows unlimited videos of up to 30 minutes each, and Team ($69 a seat, or $55 billed yearly) up to 60. “Unlimited” covers the number of videos only; dubbing minutes and credits stay capped.
- Synthesia: no cap per video is stated, and Express-2 full-body avatars have “no limit on video duration”. The real ceiling is the allowance: about 22 minutes a month on Starter.
- Elai: no per-video cap is stated, but all videos together must fit the plan’s minutes, 15 a month on Creator.
AI Studios, made by DeepBrain AI, refunds only within 14 days and only if unused. A one-star Trustpilot review from March 2026 calls the unlimited offer misleading because of a 120-minute monthly dubbing limit.
API work and automated short videos: D-ID and Revid
HeyGen bills its API separately: $0.60–$0.99 a minute on the older Avatar III engine, $2.31 for an Avatar IV photo avatar and $7.20 for Avatar V, with no free API credits since February 2026. Its Make, Zapier, n8n and HubSpot integrations, listed on Business, can run on plan credits instead. Other tools fold API use into a plan:
- Synthesia: up to 360 minutes of video a year through the API on Pro ($89, or $64 billed yearly), taken from the plan’s allowance.
- Colossyan: 360 API minutes a year on Professional.
- Elai: a public API from the $29 Creator plan.
- Revid: API, MCP server and CLI access on every paid plan.
D-ID: API-first avatars from $4.70 a month
D-ID, founded in 2017, says its studio and API have produced 200 million+ avatar videos. Lite costs $4.70 a month billed yearly ($56 a year; the page script lists $5.90 monthly) for 10 minutes a month, shared by the web app and API, and adds a D-ID watermark.
- Trial: 14 days and up to 3 minutes of video, with a full-screen watermark.
- Catch: video length rounds up to the next 15 seconds, unused minutes expire each month, and payments are non-refundable. Trustpilot, 7 October 2026: 3.9 from 39 reviews, 61% one-star.
Revid: faceless shorts on autopilot
Revid, a Paris company formerly called Typeframes, turns an idea, script, link or song into a short vertical video with visuals, a voice-over in 70+ languages and captions, and can publish it to TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. In a Revid vs HeyGen choice, Revid is built for faceless shorts rather than presenter videos: it has talking avatars, but for training presenters Revid itself points to specialized tools.
- Price: Growth costs $39 a month or $32 billed yearly for 2,000 credits, roughly 25 to 50 thirty-second videos by Revid’s estimate. Talking avatars cost 40 to 200 credits per 500 characters.
- Automation: Growth runs 3 Auto-Mode workers that each make a fresh video every day, plus scheduled publishing.
- Catch: the crossed-out $99 next to Growth has been there since at least October 2025, so $39 is the regular price. Credits reset at renewal, refunds are discretionary (under 10% of credits used, within 30 days), and EU buyers lose the 14-day withdrawal right once they start. Trustpilot: 4.0 from 304 reviews, 26% one-star.
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Free HeyGen alternatives and open-source options
HeyGen’s own Free plan has a catch for business: its terms limit Free output to “personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes”.
| Free option | What you get | Main limit |
|---|---|---|
| HeyGen Free | 3 videos a month, up to 1 min each; Avatar IV; 1 custom video avatar | Watermark; non-commercial use only |
| Colossyan Starter | 20 min a month on NEO, videos up to 20 min, 15 instant avatars | Watermark; no SCORM or API |
| Synthesia Basic | 10 min a month, 9 stock avatars | Watermark; share link only, no MP4 |
| AI Studios Free | Up to 3 videos of up to 1 min, 1 custom avatar | 720p export |
| Creatify Free | 10 credits a month, about 2 video ads | Watermark |
| Elai Free | 1 minute of video, 1 user | One minute in total |
| D-ID trial | 14 days, up to 3 min of video | Full-screen watermark |
| Revid | Free starter credits, no card | Regular use needs a paid plan |
Colossyan Starter has the largest monthly allowance here: 20 minutes, with no card and no end date. Its help center grants a commercial license on paid plans without saying whether that covers the free tier, so ask before publishing.
Open source: we found no verified open-source tool that matches the hosted avatars, voice cloning and translation these products sell, and we didn’t evaluate self-hosted projects, so we name none.
How we picked and checked
We started from Google’s results for “HeyGen alternatives”, where the top 10 on 7 October 2026 were vendor blogs, Reddit and YouTube. We kept tools with a public plan for a business job: training, explainers, ads, API work or shorts. Arcads stays in, with its hidden prices flagged.
On 7 October 2026 we read each vendor’s pricing page, terms, refund policy and Trustpilot profile, plus G2 for three of them. We did not buy these plans, so there are no screenshots or sample videos from paid accounts and no output-quality score; see our testing methods.
We may earn commissions through the Colossyan, Synthesia, Elai, Creatify and Revid links. HeyGen’s affiliate program admits only video creators with 5,000+ followers and excludes blog-only sites; D-ID’s is invitation-only. We earn nothing from HeyGen, D-ID, Arcads, AI Studios or TopView.
Main sources: HeyGen’s pricing, credit rates, API pricing, terms, privacy policy and security pages. Pricing pages of Colossyan, Synthesia, Elai, Creatify, Revid, AI Studios, D-ID and TopView; acceptable use policies of Synthesia and Colossyan; Arcads prices from eesel.ai (17 June 2026).
FAQ
It depends on the job. For SCORM training on a self-serve plan, Colossyan Professional ($89, or $59 billed yearly). For customer data stored in the EU, Synthesia. For UGC-style ads, Creatify. For automated faceless shorts, Revid. HeyGen lists the most languages in our tables (175) and offers 4K from its $49 Pro plan.
HeyGen’s own documents describe a US company. The privacy policy (updated 11 August 2026) calls HeyGen Technology Inc. “a domestic corporation established in the United States” and gives a Los Angeles address. Its terms follow California law, the about page names founder Joshua Xu, formerly an engineer at Snap, and the security page says customer data is stored in the US on AWS.
Free plans, yes; open source, not that we could verify. Colossyan Starter gives 20 minutes a month with a watermark, Synthesia Basic 10 minutes with a watermark and no MP4 download, and AI Studios 3 one-minute videos in 720p. We found no verified open-source project that matches their avatars, voice cloning and translation.
On HeyGen, paid plans include unlimited photo avatars and the Free plan up to 3. Colossyan’s Instant Avatar works from a photo or a short phone or webcam video, with 15 on Starter and 20 on Professional. Both vendors require the explicit consent of the person shown, and neither allows avatars of public figures without their consent.
Through APIs, yes, billed differently. Synthesia’s Pro and Colossyan’s Professional plans each include 360 minutes of API video a year, Elai offers an API from Creator, and Revid on every paid plan. HeyGen charges for API use separately, from $0.60 a minute, and its Make integration on Business can use plan credits. We didn’t check which alternatives have ready-made Make.com modules.
Few do. Colossyan refunds in full within 14 days if you generated under 10 minutes, AI Studios within 14 days only if you never used the service, and Revid at its discretion within 30 days if under 10% of credits are used. HeyGen, Synthesia, Creatify, Elai and D-ID state that payments are non-refundable.