This category contains three different products wearing the same label. Picking the wrong kind wastes more money than picking the wrong vendor.
The three kinds
Avatar tools put a synthetic presenter on screen reading your script: Synthesia, HeyGen, Colossyan and Elai.io. They suit training, onboarding and product explainers, and they are metered in minutes or credits of finished video.
Generative models create footage from a prompt: Runway and Luma Dream Machine. They produce shots, not finished videos, and you will need an editor as well.
Script and clip assemblers turn text or an existing recording into an edited video with stock footage, voice-over and captions: Pictory, invideo AI, Fliki, VEED, Descript and Steve AI.
Work out what the meter measures
Almost nothing here is priced per seat, and the meters are not comparable across vendors.
- Minutes of output: Pictory (200, 600, 1,800), Elai.io (1, 15, 50), Colossyan (20, 30 plus 10), Steve AI (100, 300, 400).
- Credits: Synthesia (1,200 a month free; 14,500 and 44,000 a year), HeyGen (600, 1,000, 1,500 a month), Runway (625, 2,250, 9,500), Luma (10,000, 40,000, 150,000), invideo (750 to 42,500), VEED (6,000 to 180,000), Fliki (36 a month free; 2,160 and 7,200 a year).
- Transcription hours: Descript (1, 10, 30, 40).
A credit means something different at every vendor, and most pages do not say how many seconds one buys. Where the vendor translates credits into minutes, as Synthesia does, that is the number to plan with.
Check the seat count, because most plans have one
HeyGen's plans below Business are single-seat. Elai.io, Pictory, Fliki and invideo do not publish a seat count at all. Synthesia counts one editor with three or five guests. Colossyan includes three seats at US$59 with extra members at US$30. VEED and Descript are priced per user, so a team simply multiplies.
For anything beyond one person making video, this is usually the constraint that decides the plan.
Try before you compare
Output quality varies more by material than by vendor. Seven products here publish a free tier: Colossyan (20 minutes a month), Synthesia (about 10 minutes), Descript (60 minutes of transcription), Fliki (36 credits), HeyGen (3 videos), Runway (125 one-time credits) and Elai.io (1 minute).
Run the same script through two of them before reading another comparison, including this one.
What we could not verify
Fliki's page showed only discounted yearly rates, so its paid plans are recorded without a monthly price. Luma's page showed no free tier. Vidnoz was left out of this catalogue because its page showed a first-month promotional price with no standard price beside it, and recording that as the price would have been misleading.
