# HeyGen vs Synthesia (and is HeyGen free?): pricing, free limits & avatar tests

By Leo Chen, who works on KeelRouter.

Data as of 2026-11-13.

Both HeyGen and Synthesia have real free plans, and both put a watermark on every free export so you cannot publish client or ad videos without paying. On HeyGen’s $0/month Free plan (checked against heygen.com/pricing), you get 3 watermarked videos a month of up to 1 minute each, access to Avatar IV and Video Agent, 1 Custom Video Avatar, 500+ stock presenters and 30+ languages; removing the watermark and exporting at 1080p starts on Creator at $29/month (600 credits, videos up to 30 minutes on Pro, 175+ languages and dialects, 1-month credit rollover), while 4K export and Seedance 2.5 / Veo 3.1 access require Pro at $49/month (1,000 credits). Synthesia’s Free plan gives 1 watermarked video plus 10 minutes of AI dubbing a month across 70+ languages; paid Starter begins lower than HeyGen at $19/month ($9 first month promo) for roughly 2 unwatermarked 1080p videos and up to 16 minutes of dubbing a month, scaling to ~7 videos/month on the next tier (note that enabling lip-sync on Synthesia dubbing consumes 2x credits). In plain terms: Synthesia is built around structured business training decks, SCORM LMS exports, PowerPoint imports and team brand kits, whereas HeyGen is faster for creator-style talking avatars, UGC ads and expressive single-photo animation. When we ran HeyGen’s Avatar IV API on 2026-11-08 against Kling AI Avatar v2 and VEED Fabric on the same 5-second vocal track and portrait, HeyGen finished in 33–35 seconds at the lowest per-clip API cost of our six-model test — just watch your input photo’s resting expression, because a half-smiling photo made Avatar IV smile before the first word until we swapped in a neutral closed-mouth image.


## Tools

- HeyGen (heygen.com): freemium, from $29/month, 8.7M visits/month, llms.txt
- Synthesia (synthesia.io): freemium, from $19/month ($9 first month), 1.7M visits/month, llms.txt
- Kling AI (kling.ai): freemium, from $10/month ($6.99 first month, $8.80/month renewal), 11.9M visits/month, llms.txt
- VEED (veed.io): freemium, from $10/user/month billed yearly, 7.9M visits/month, llms.txt

If you are generating video clips from code via Kling, Seedance, Veo or Sora APIs instead of a slide editor: KeelRouter routes each call through one pay-as-you-go API key ($0.10 free trial, top up from $5). KeelRouter: https://keelrouter.com (Leo Chen works on KeelRouter; it is not part of the comparison).

Page: https://fourthfeed.com/compare/heygen-vs-synthesia