Synthesia vs HeyGen pricing: what the same 30 second video costs on each, and why the credit counts mislead

Short answer: HeyGen is cheaper per finished video on every engine except its most expensive one, and the plan prices will not tell you that. Both charge $29 at the entry paid tier. Synthesia includes twice as many credits for it, 1,200 against 600, and a 30 second video still costs about $1.45 at Synthesia against 39 cents to $1.16 at HeyGen. Synthesia bills a flat 60 credits for that video and HeyGen bills between 8 and 24 depending on which avatar engine you click. But price is the wrong tiebreaker here, because the two tools are built for different jobs: Synthesia for training, onboarding and internal video at scale, HeyGen for marketing and social creative.

Every figure below came off synthesia.io and heygen.com on 30 August 2026, including HeyGen's credit rates, which have recently moved off its pricing page and into its help center.

These two tools are not really competing for the same job

Both render a synthetic presenter reading a script you supply. That is where the similarity stops. Synthesia organizes its entire site around learning and development, sales enablement, HR, compliance training and standard operating procedures. HeyGen's pricing page is headed "pricing plans for creators and marketers." Neither is being coy about it.

The practical consequences show up in what each one will and will not sell you.

If your answer is in the top half of that table, the rest of this article is interesting but not decisive. Buy Synthesia. A rendered MP4 is not training until somebody has watched it and the completion is on record, so budget for a system that can host the modules and certify who finished them alongside whatever you spend on rendering. That second cost is usually larger than the video tool and it catches teams out.

What the same 30 seconds costs on each

Here is the comparison that actually decides a marketing budget, worked to a cost per finished 30 second video on the $29 entry plan at both vendors.

Synthesia lands above HeyGen's whole range, and it is 14 times the cost of HeyGen's cheapest engine. It is worth being fair about why: Synthesia's 10 minute allowance is a hard cap on a training tool that expects long-form video, and it is deliberately not priced as a high-volume ad renderer. Nobody at Synthesia is pretending you should be buying 300 short clips a month.

One detail runs in HeyGen's favor and is easy to miss. HeyGen bills for the seconds of avatar generation rather than the full runtime of the finished video. If your 30 second ad has the presenter on screen for 12 seconds and product footage for the rest, you are billed for 12 seconds. Synthesia's minutes are counted against the finished video, and its own pricing page notes that a 59 second video leaves you 9 minutes 1 second of a 10 minute allowance.

Why the credit counts mislead you

Look again at the credits column. Synthesia's credits are the cheaper of the two by a distance: 1,200 credits for $29 works out at about 2.4 cents each, against HeyGen's 4.8 cents. Synthesia's credits are half the price and its videos cost more, because it spends 60 of its cheap credits where HeyGen spends 8 of its expensive ones.

So a lower cost per credit is not a lower cost per video, and a bigger credit allowance is not more video. A credit is not a unit of anything. It is a private currency each vendor mints at its own rate, and the rate is set by internal cost and packaging rather than by any shared standard. This is not unique to these two. Creatify charges 10 credits for the same 30 seconds at 39 cents a credit, which puts the same output at $3.90 on its entry plan. InVideo goes further and runs the whole spread inside a single plan: on its $17 tier the same 30 seconds costs about 2 cents in Basic mode and $1.81 in Ultra mode, an 80 times difference decided by one dropdown, which is why we broke its credit system out separately.

The one habit worth taking from this: before you compare any two AI video tools, convert both to a cost per finished unit of output at the length you actually publish. It takes two minutes and it inverts the answer often enough to be worth doing every time. We ran the same exercise across the category in our Synthesia pricing breakdown and our HeyGen pricing comparison.

Neither free plan is what it looks like

Synthesia's free tier looks three times more generous and is the weaker of the two for evaluation, because nothing you make on it can leave the platform. Ten minutes of video you cannot export is a demo, not a trial. If your test is "ship one real video and see what happens," that test costs $29 at Synthesia and nothing at HeyGen.

Going up a tier does not buy cheaper video at either one

This surprised us at both vendors, and it is the opposite of how software volume pricing normally works.

In both cases the upgrade is buying something other than volume economics. Synthesia's Creator plan adds API access, five personal avatars, branded video pages and interactive video. HeyGen's Business plan adds SAML and SSO, twice the concurrency, five custom digital twins and centralized billing. Those are real things to want. Just do not buy an upper tier expecting your cost per video to fall, because at these two it rises.

There is one exception worth knowing at HeyGen, and it is the only genuine volume discount either vendor publishes. The Pro plan is a slider rather than a fixed tier, running from 1,000 credits at $49 up to 100,000 credits at $4,300. At the top of that slider a credit costs 4.3 cents, the cheapest HeyGen sells.

What is not in either price

Both numbers cover a presenter reading a script. Neither covers the things that turn a presenter into an ad or a course.

For marketing, that means product footage, the edit, captions and the hook. An AI presenter praising a product the viewer never sees is a weaker ad than a plain screen recording, so budget for b-roll or design the creative around a demo. Synthesia charges for some of that b-roll out of the same credit pool, at 96 credits for a single asset with a customizable avatar prompted to act, which is 80 percent of a minute of finished video.

For training, it means the script itself, the review cycle, and hosting. Synthesia's Studio avatar, the highest-fidelity digital twin, is a $1,000 a year add-on available only to annual subscribers and takes up to 10 days to create. Its API is included from the $89 Creator plan but capped at 360 minutes of video a year, and those minutes come out of your plan allowance rather than adding to it.

Third-party pricing pages are running behind

This category re-prices often enough that secondary sources go stale fast, and several currently circulating figures are wrong. Synthesia's own page carried a "new lower prices" banner when we checked, advertising plans from $18 a month.

We had the middle row wrong ourselves until this recheck, which is the argument for pulling numbers from the vendor rather than from anybody's summary, including ours. If a pricing figure you are relying on does not carry a date, treat it as unverified.

Which should you buy?

Buy Synthesia if the videos are internal: training, onboarding, compliance, SOPs and enablement, especially at a volume that justifies the unmetered Enterprise tier, and especially in a regulated business where the compliance certifications shorten procurement. Its per-minute price is far below what the same ten minutes costs with a camera and an editor, and that is the comparison that matters for internal video.

Buy HeyGen if the videos are external: social, paid creative, product explainers and spokesperson reads. It is cheaper per clip on every engine but its top one, it exports 4K from $49, and its credits roll over a month, which suits the uneven rhythm of campaign work.

Buy neither for testimonials. A synthetic presenter delivering a first-person endorsement is a fabricated testimonial from a person who does not exist, which is the shape the FTC rule on fake reviews addresses, and a good render does not make it safer. Third-person narration, demonstration and explanation are on firm ground. The moment the script says "I tried this," you need a real person.

Whichever you pick, both tools start from a script you have to arrive with, and the quality of that script decides more about the finished video than the engine does. That is the part we do: describe your product and UGCMarketplace writes the brief and the scene-by-scene script, with the opening three seconds spelled out and the technical spec attached, ready to paste into any of them. We render no video, and we are not an alternative to either tool on this page.