HeyGen vs InVideo (2026): Which AI Video Tool for Ads?

"HeyGen vs InVideo" looks like a comparison between two AI video generators. In 2026 it is really a choice between two production models. HeyGen starts with a presenter: you type a script and an avatar engine performs it. InVideo starts with an editor: an agent turns your brief into shots, sends each shot to one of 200+ third-party models or the stock library, and lays the result on a timeline you can cut by hand.

Both products have changed a lot since most of the pages ranking for this query were written. HeyGen has repriced its avatar engines. Its help centre now lists 4 to 48 credits per minute depending on engine and look, and it has added Seedance 2.5, Veo 3.1 and its own HeyGen Video 1 model to its plans. InVideo has rebuilt its plans as Starter, Plus and Max, rescaled its credit unit, and now sells three models under HeyGen's own name inside its catalogue. Prices from July or August are no longer useful for either product.

So instead of comparing feature grids, we did one specific thing. We wrote one 60-second ad script and, on 2026-10-27, priced it through every production route each vendor publishes a rate for, using each vendor's own pricing page, help-centre rate cards and terms. We did not render the script on either product. No paid account was charged, and this page makes no claim about which one looks better. It covers cost, limits and fit, which you can check against the vendor pages yourself.

Neither product is ours. A short note on where Soku fits comes at the end, after the comparison.

The Short Answer

Choose HeyGen if a person speaking to camera carries the ad: a founder, a spokesperson, a recurring presenter, or a likeness you own. One engine renders the whole script at a known per-minute rate, the same face and voice hold across every variant, credits roll over, and lip-synced translation is 6 to 10 credits per minute. For a talking-head ad it is the cheaper and more direct tool, from about $0.19 to $2.32 per finished minute on Creator, depending on the engine.

Choose InVideo if the ad is a cut rather than a performance: product shots, stock b-roll, your own footage, text and a voiceover. You get 200+ models behind one bill, and manual edits, re-exports and aspect-ratio re-cuts cost no credits. Its cost range is much wider. The same script cost $0.12 as a stock-and-voiceover cut and $34.56 as twelve generated 1080p shots on Plus.

Do not choose on the avatar alone. InVideo can produce talking presenters, including through a model it labels "HeyGen Photo Avatar". HeyGen can generate cinematic b-roll on Pro. Each one does the other's job at a worse rate. The question is which job most of your ads need.

What Each Product Actually Is In October 2026

HeyGen: a presenter engine with a growing generation shelf

HeyGen's core is still the avatar. Its help centre, updated the week of this check, gives credit rates for three avatar generations:

Two caveats come straight from HeyGen's own page. First, it says the rates "are the standard rates that apply to most accounts" and that "some accounts may see different credit costs or limits for certain features depending on account creation date and region". The cost shown in the app before you generate is what you are charged. Second, these rates differ a lot from the ones HeyGen published earlier this year. In August its pricing FAQ listed Avatar IV and V at 20 credits per minute, Avatar III at 3 and Video Agent at 20. If you budgeted from an older article, including our own earlier HeyGen vs Synthesia comparison, an Avatar IV video-look minute now costs 55% more than that budget assumed, and a Video Agent minute four times as much.

Around the avatar, HeyGen has added generation. Creator includes "HeyGen Video 1: text, image, and reference to video". Pro adds 4K export, Cinematic Avatars ("place your avatar in dynamic, text-prompted cinematic scenes"), Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana, and what the pricing page calls "Access to Seedance 2.5". HeyGen's own plans article still describes the Pro engine as "Seedance 2.0 engine (inside Cinematic Mode, Avatar Shots, Video Agent, and B-Roll creation)". The two pages disagree on the version, and we could not resolve which is current.

InVideo: an agentic editor in front of a model marketplace

InVideo now describes itself as an agentic video editor. Its help centre says manual timeline editing "is free and does not consume credits", and that "exporting or downloading content does not consume credits". Credits are spent on AI work: the agent's processing and the image, video, voice and music models it calls. Its video model pricing page lists about 70 video models, each priced per second or per generation. A few that matter for ads:

InVideo's pricing page adds per-5-second figures for Seedance 2.5 on its comparison table: about 56 credits at 720p, 96 at 1080p and 24.5 for Draft. Voices come from a separate audio table. ElevenLabs text-to-speech is 3.20 to 4.00 credits per 1,000 characters, and cheaper engines such as Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS are 1.60.

The cost InVideo does not publish is the agent's own. Its help article on agent charging says each agent response may involve "reasoning through your brief, generating images, producing video clips, designing voice", and that the per-exchange charge appears after the fact in a three-dot menu on each message. There is no published rate for the reasoning part. You can set a per-project credit limit and tell the agent to ask before it generates video, and we would turn both on before the first serious project.

The Plans, Verified 2026-10-27

HeyGen

Pro is a ladder, not a single plan. The ten published tiers run from 1,000 credits at $49 ($0.049 per credit) to 100,000 credits at $4,300 ($0.043). Billed yearly, the 100,000 tier is $43,030 a year, or about $0.036 per credit. One quirk: Pro at 3,000 credits costs $149 a month, the same as Business with 1,500. Business gets you a shared workspace, SAML/SSO, SCORM, top-up credit packs, 5 Custom Video Avatars and 60-minute videos. It does not get you more credits. A solo producer gets twice the credits on Pro for the same money.

InVideo

Three things on that page are worth knowing before you buy.

• The annual prices are a promotion, not the list price. The page's own plan data shows the same base amount for monthly and annual billing, with a "Special Promo Annual 50" offer applied to Starter, Plus and Max. The banner says it applies to all annual plans. The promotion may not last, so treat $10, $30 and $75 as today's offer.
• "Lowest cost per credit" is printed only on Max, but the arithmetic does not support it at the 5,000 tier. Plus is $60 for 2,000 credits and Max is $150 for 5,000. Both work out to exactly $0.030 per credit monthly and $0.015 on the promotional annual price. Max does buy you more storage, stock and guest seats, and it shows "Save $885" per seat a year. That figure does not match the displayed $75 a month, which would save $900.
• The resolution gate is unclear. The plan data tags Starter and Plus with Full HD export and Max, Team, Scale and Enterprise with 4K. The page's plan-finder lists "Your own footage, 4K export" as available "from Starter". We could not tell from the page which of the two applies to which kind of footage. Check before you buy if 4K delivery matters.

The terms that change the math

Rollover. HeyGen: "Monthly subscribers' unused credits roll over for one more month. Annual subscribers' credits accumulate until their annual renewal date." InVideo: "Your credit allowance resets every month, on the day of the month you subscribed — on annual plans too ... Unused credits do not roll over." For an advertiser whose creative production comes in bursts, this matters as much as the sticker price. Burn 400 of InVideo Plus's 2,000 credits in a quiet month and each credit you used cost $0.15, not $0.03.

Running out mid-month. HeyGen Creator and Pro cannot buy credit packs. You move up a tier, prorated, and the extra credits arrive immediately. Only Business can buy top-ups, at $0.05 per credit in blocks of 100 for $5. InVideo lets any paid plan buy Extra Credits from $5, with volume discounts from $50 up to a $2,000 cap per billing cycle, an optional auto-reload, and a monthly spending limit that defaults to 2,000 credits.

Seats. HeyGen's Free, Creator and Pro plans are one seat each. The first shared workspace means Business at $149 plus $20 per extra seat, and adding seats does not add credits. InVideo prices every plan per seat. From Plus upward it adds free guest seats with a small credit allowance, which suits one producer working with several reviewers.

Price changes. InVideo's pricing FAQ says it reserves "the right to update credit costs at any time, without prior notice". Its Terms say material changes to the Terms, including fees, get at least 30 days' notice, and that subscription price changes apply from the next renewal. The FAQ and the Terms pull in different directions. HeyGen's help centre says rates can vary by account. On both products, any cost per ad you calculate is a reading on a date, not a contract.

Refunds. InVideo's Terms allow a refund request within 7 days of an initial purchase or renewal only if no credits or premium features were used in that period. Credits are non-refundable.

Can You Run The Ad? Watermarks, Resolution And Ad-Usage Rights

This is where the free plans part ways, and it is the part most comparisons skip.

In practice: a HeyGen Free video is not an ad you can run. Budget at least Creator before testing HeyGen for paid media. InVideo's free tier is mainly for images and image-to-video under a weekly quota. A real 60-second ad needs a paid plan on either product. The stock-licence line is easy to miss. A stock-heavy InVideo cut inherits each stock supplier's terms, and some suppliers restrict certain uses. Read them before a stock clip carries a paid campaign.

One Script, Both Price Lists

Here is the script we costed. It is a direct-response read for a fictional cold brew brand, written for this page: 140 words, 732 characters, which runs about 60 seconds at a natural ad-read pace.

I stopped buying four-dollar coffees in March, and I did not give up coffee to do it. This is Northline cold brew concentrate. One bottle makes sixteen cups. You pour two fingers over ice, top it with water or oat milk, and you are done in ten seconds. No machine, no pods, no line. It is steeped for eighteen hours, so it is smooth, not bitter, and it keeps in the fridge for two weeks. I worked it out: a café latte five days a week costs me about eighty dollars a month. Northline costs me eleven. Same caffeine, better taste, and I get my mornings back. If you drink coffee every day, try one bottle. Your first order ships free, and if you do not love it, we refund you, no questions. Northline. Cold brew that pays for itself.

Method. For each production route a vendor publishes a rate for, we took the credits needed for 60 seconds of finished output from that vendor's own rate card. We multiplied by the USD per credit of the cheapest monthly plan that offers the route: HeyGen Creator at $0.0483 ($29 / 600), HeyGen Pro at $0.049 ($49 / 1,000) for the Pro-only Seedance mode, InVideo Plus at $0.030 ($60 / 2,000). We used monthly billing because annual InVideo prices are promotional, and we assumed every credit gets spent. Where InVideo's route needs a voice, we added 4 credits, the top of the ElevenLabs rate for 1,000 characters, because InVideo does not say whether it rounds up to the next 1,000. For generated-footage routes we assumed twelve 5-second shots, a typical cut rate for a 60-second paid-social ad.

Four things stand out.

• For a talking head, every HeyGen avatar engine is cheaper than every InVideo avatar route. The cheapest InVideo presenter route, Kling Avatar at its lowest setting, is $4.08 for the minute. That is more than HeyGen's most expensive avatar engine, Avatar V at $2.32. Before the voice is added, the model InVideo labels "HeyGen Photo Avatar" costs about 5.6 times HeyGen's own Avatar IV photo-look rate ($4.32 against $0.77). We cannot say it is the same engine, because InVideo does not name the version. But if you want HeyGen-made presenters, buying them from HeyGen is cheaper.
• For a stock-and-voiceover cut, InVideo is the only product here with a published price, and it is close to zero. Editing and export are free, stock comes from a monthly download quota, and the voice is about 4 credits. The unknown is the agent fee. If you build the cut by hand on the timeline instead of asking the agent, you avoid it. HeyGen's AI Studio has templates and Generate Assets b-roll, but no published per-minute rate for a stock-footage cut.
• For fully generated footage, both are expensive, and HeyGen's Seedance mode undercuts InVideo's Seedance 2.5. Video Agent in Seedance mode lists 240 credits per minute, $11.76 on Pro. Twelve Seedance 2.5 shots on InVideo are $20.16 at 720p. The comparison is not exact, because HeyGen does not state the Seedance version or resolution behind that rate. InVideo gives you per-shot control, Draft mode for cheap iteration and the full model catalogue.
• The spread inside each product matters more than the spread between them. HeyGen ranges 62-fold across its own routes, and InVideo ranges almost 300-fold. Your engine and model choice moves your cost per ad far more than the vendor you pick.

What this table is not. It is not a render test. It does not include re-generations, and real ad production almost always involves several takes. It does not include InVideo's agent fee, which is unpublished. It assumes the standard HeyGen rates, which HeyGen says can vary by account and region. Every figure is a list-price reading from 2026-10-27, and both vendors show the actual charge in the app before you confirm.

Localising The Winner: One Ad Into Five Languages

When an ad wins, the next step is often local versions. Here the gap gets wider. Using the same method and five target languages:

HeyGen's translation suite covers 175 languages and dialects on paid plans, with a brand glossary on Creator and editable, proofread translation scripts from Pro. InVideo can rebuild an ad for a new market through its agent, but it has no packaged translation product with a published per-minute rate. The closest equivalent is paying for a new voice and a lip-sync pass per language. For localisation, HeyGen is the stronger and cheaper product by a wide margin.

Which Tool For Which Ad Format

Many teams that make both kinds of ad will end up paying for both. That is a reasonable outcome, not a failure to choose. A talking head from HeyGen dropped into an InVideo timeline as a clip uses each product for the job its meter is built for.

What We Did Not Test, And What We Could Not Verify

We want to be precise about the limits of this page.

• No output was rendered on either product. We have no quality, lip-sync accuracy or realism verdict. Any page that offers one should show you the renders.
• InVideo's agent fee is unpublished. We could not price the reasoning part of an agent exchange. The help centre only says the per-exchange charge is visible after the response.
• InVideo's help centre is partly out of date. Its "Plan Limits" and "How Do Credits Work?" pages still list plans named Basic (190 credits), Pro (1,000), Pro 2x, Ultra (3,000), Ultra 2x and Ultra 3x. Those do not match the Starter, Plus and Max plans on the live pricing page. One older help article gives a Kling 2.6 Standard example at 0.5 credits, and a newer one gives the same example at 5. That suggests the credit unit was rescaled about tenfold. We used the pricing page and the per-model pricing table as current.
• InVideo top-up expiry is inconsistent. The Extra Credits page says purchased credits last 12 months. A table on the credits overview page says top-up credits reset each billing cycle.
• InVideo free-plan watermarking is not stated on the pricing page or the free-plan help article we read.
• HeyGen's Seedance version on Pro: the pricing page says Seedance 2.5, and the plans help article says Seedance 2.0.
• HeyGen's rates can differ by account. HeyGen says this itself. Our table uses the standard rates.
• Which HeyGen engine InVideo resells under "HeyGen Photo Avatar", "HeyGen Video" and "HeyGen Lipsync" is not disclosed.

What Neither Of Them Does

Both products stop at an exported file. Neither connects to a Meta, Google or TikTok ad account, launches the ad, reads spend or conversions back, or tells you which of the variants you just made deserves more budget. InVideo's UGC agent says it can "read your winners" if you upload them, but it reads ads you hand over. It does not read live campaign results.

That is a scope statement, not a criticism. It does mean the HeyGen-vs-InVideo decision is smaller than it looks. You are choosing how to make the file. Which file to make next, and whether the last one worked, is decided somewhere else.

Which One To Choose

Choose HeyGen Creator ($29) if your ads are mostly a person talking to camera, if you want your own likeness or a consistent presenter, or if you localise. Move to Pro for 4K, Cinematic Avatars, Seedance-powered scenes or more credits. A solo producer should not pay for Business: Pro at the same $149 has twice the credits. Business is only worth it once you need a shared workspace.

Choose InVideo Plus ($60) if your ads are cuts built from generated shots, stock and your own footage, and you want one bill for many models plus a real timeline. Skip Starter for ad work, because it has no Seedance 2.5, Lite agent only and no guest seats. Buy Max for storage, stock downloads and seats, not for a cheaper credit, since Plus and Max cost the same per credit. Plan around monthly expiry by buying for your quietest month and covering peaks with Extra Credits.

Use both if your creative mix includes presenter ads and cut-together ads. Render the presenter in HeyGen, where it is cheapest, then cut it with product shots and stock in InVideo, where editing is free.

For the wider field, see our HeyGen alternatives and InVideo alternatives breakdowns, and the HeyGen vs Synthesia head-to-head for the avatar-versus-avatar decision.

Where Soku Fits

Since we build in this space: Soku is an AI advertising agent, not an avatar studio or a video editor. It does not integrate with HeyGen or InVideo and does not resell either. Here is what it runs, from its code:

• The AI avatar video generator animates an uploaded portrait into a short talking clip with Seedance 2.0 Mini image-to-video (bytedance/seedance-2.0/mini/image-to-video on fal), at 480p or 720p and 4 to 15 seconds, defaulting to 9:16. It is a clip generator, not a trained avatar, and it does not replace HeyGen for a full 60-second presenter read.
• The AI lip sync tool runs Sync Lipsync 2 (fal-ai/sync-lipsync/v2) on an uploaded clip and audio track, up to 15 seconds of source video. The AI text to speech tool runs ElevenLabs v3 (fal-ai/elevenlabs/tts/eleven-v3).
• Where Soku differs from both products is the step after the file. It connects to ad accounts, can launch creatives into Meta campaigns, and syncs campaign performance back, so you can see which of your HeyGen or InVideo variants actually sells. It does not make either tool's output better or cheaper.

Sources

All prices, credit rates and terms were read from the vendors' own pages on 2026-10-27:

• HeyGen plans, Pro credit tiers, yearly prices, feature comparison and pricing FAQ — <https://www.heygen.com/pricing>
• HeyGen credit rates per feature, rollover and Business credit packs — <https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/15126059-how-to-use-credits-on-heygen>
• HeyGen credit-based plans explained, Free plan quota and Pro Seedance engine — <https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/15125761-heygen-credit-based-pricing-plans-subscriptions-explained>
• HeyGen Terms of Service, last updated October 15, 2026 — <https://www.heygen.com/terms>
• InVideo plans, seats, plan data, annual promotion and pricing FAQ — <https://invideo.io/pricing>
• InVideo per-model video credit rates — <https://invideo.io/help/billing/video-model-pricing/>
• InVideo audio and voice credit rates — <https://invideo.io/help/billing/audio-pricing/>
• InVideo Extra Credits, spending limits and expiry — <https://invideo.io/help/billing/extra-credits/>
• InVideo plans and credits overview, free editing and export — <https://help.invideo.io/en/articles/11528140-invideo-plans-and-credits-everything-you-need-to-know>
• InVideo agent credit charging — <https://help.invideo.io/en/articles/14718313-how-credits-are-charged-when-using-ai-agents>
• InVideo free plan — <https://help.invideo.io/en/articles/9380226-can-i-use-invideo-ai-for-free>
• InVideo Terms and Conditions, effective August 12, 2026 — <https://invideo.io/terms-and-conditions/>
• InVideo UGC ads agent — <https://invideo.io/make/ugc-ads/>