Synthesia vs HeyGen: The Sales Pitch vs the Pricing Page

Is Synthesia or HeyGen Cheaper at 50+ Videos a Month?

Synthesia vs HeyGen at 50 videos a month depends on the HeyGen engine. At 50 finished one-minute videos a month, HeyGen is cheapest on Avatar III, at $29, and on an Avatar IV photo avatar, at $49, but its Avatar IV video avatar needs 1,550 credits, which only a $154 Business month or a higher Pro tier covers. Synthesia’s Pro plan holds all 50 minutes for $89 a month, or $59 billed yearly.

Start with the ladders as each vendor printed them on October 27, 2026. Synthesia now bills in credits. Every plan, the free Basic plan included, carries 10 minutes of video and 500 credits a month; Starter adds 1,250 credits for $19 a month ($9 for the first month) or $14 billed yearly, and Pro adds 6,000 for $89 a month ($49 for the first month) or $59 billed yearly, with larger Pro credit levels above it (SH-02). A typical finished minute uses about 100 credits, more if the avatar stays on screen throughout (SH-04). On September 22 the same page sold minutes instead: Starter at $29, or $18 yearly, and a Creator plan with 30 minutes a month at $89, or $64 yearly (SH-02, S-03); Creator no longer appears. HeyGen’s ladder did not move: Creator $29 a month, or $24 billed annually, for 600 credits, Pro $49 for 1,000, and Business $149 for 1,500 (SH-01). Its burn rates did. HeyGen’s help center now charges 4 credits a minute for an Avatar III video avatar and 7 for a photo one, 31 for an Avatar IV video avatar and 16 for a photo one, and 48 for Avatar V (SH-14); the August capture had Avatar IV at 20 and Avatar III at 3 (H-01). The free plans still differ in kind: Synthesia’s gives 10 minutes a month with 9 stock avatars and a watermark, HeyGen’s three watermarked videos a month capped at one minute each, translating into 30-plus languages rather than the paid plans’ 175 (SH-02, SH-01, SH-09).

Now scale it to 50 finished one-minute videos a month. On HeyGen, Avatar III video avatars need 200 credits, inside Creator’s 600 at $29, about $0.58 a finished minute with two thirds of the credits unused; Avatar IV photo avatars need 800, inside Pro’s 1,000 at $49, about $0.98 a minute. Avatar IV video avatars need 1,550, more than Pro’s base tier. Creator and Pro cannot buy credit packs, only move up a tier, and the prices of the Pro tiers between 1,000 credits at $49 and 100,000 at $4,300 sit behind a selector the capture could not read (SH-01, SH-14). The one route with a printed price is Business for a single seat: 1,500 credits plus one 100-credit pack at $5, $154 in all, about $3.08 a minute. On Synthesia, 50 minutes are the 10 included plus 40 more at about 100 credits each, 4,000 credits, which Starter’s 1,750 cannot hold and Pro’s 6,500 can (SH-04). That is about $1.78 a finished minute on Pro billed monthly and about $1.18 billed yearly, with roughly 25 minutes of credit to spare. All of it is Mimo’s arithmetic on the vendors’ printed figures. In September the same 50 minutes needed two Synthesia Creator accounts at about $2.56 a minute; one Pro plan now covers them.

Retakes move the two bills in different ways. Synthesia charges only for newly generated footage, so regenerating three seconds of an existing video costs three seconds (SH-02); HeyGen charges the full rate for each re-rendered minute, 31 credits on an Avatar IV video avatar (SH-14). Leftover allowance differs too: Synthesia’s monthly credits reset each billing period (SH-02), while HeyGen’s roll over for one extra cycle (SH-14).

The one hands-on test that bought both products points the other way, and it deserves a careful read. On blogrecode.com, Mia Elvasia rendered one 2-minute product-explainer script 50 times on each tool, 100 finished minutes per platform, and reported totals rather than rates (published March 12, 2026, updated August 17, 2026). Synthesia came to $95 over three months on the minute plans it sold at the time, moving from Starter to Creator partway through. HeyGen came to $72 with Avatar III and $384 with Avatar IV, which one line of the article breaks down as $72 base plus $312 in credit packs (SH-03). On those totals the Avatar IV run cost about four times Synthesia’s, and that multiple rests on the article’s own premise: “At 200 credits/month on the Creator plan, you get 10 minutes of Avatar IV video.” The article names Synthesia its cost winner, yet its own Avatar III total was the cheapest figure in the test.

Read the article’s arithmetic closely before leaning on it. Its $384 HeyGen total is itemized a second way elsewhere in the same piece, three months at $24 plus two $150 credit packs, which adds up to $372, and its Synthesia line, three months at $18 plus a $64 Creator upgrade, adds up to $118 rather than the $95 it reports (SH-03). Mimo cannot reconcile those figures on the author’s behalf, so this page quotes the published totals and treats them as approximate. Divided by the 100 minutes the test produced, they come to roughly $0.95 a minute on Synthesia and $0.72 on HeyGen Avatar III; that is Mimo’s division, since blogrecode prints no per-minute price. The Synthesia figure sits far below the $2.13 to $2.97 Creator list range Synthesia’s minute pricing implied at the time (S-03), one more sign the totals undercount something. The Avatar III figure runs the other way, well above HeyGen’s list math of about $0.19 a minute today (4 credits at $29 for 600), because 400 Avatar III credits fit inside a single Creator month and the test paid for three. The Avatar IV total is left undivided, because the next section shows the credit count underneath it no longer holds.

One commitment detail runs the same way on both tools. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the paid period on Synthesia and HeyGen alike, and both treat payments as non-refundable by default, with a narrow access-problem exception at Synthesia and a discretionary 15-day request window at HeyGen for purchases made directly or through Google Play, 14 days through Apple (S-12, S-13, H-12, H-13). Decide before a renewal date, not after it.

How Many Credits Does HeyGen Creator Actually Include?

HeyGen’s Creator plan includes 600 credits a month, according to HeyGen’s own pricing page, read again on October 27, 2026 and unchanged since the August 15 capture (SH-01, H-01). The 200-credit figure in circulation comes from third-party reviews, and it is the number underneath the $384 Avatar IV total in the 50-video test.

The dispute has a paper trail. On June 14, 2026, an independent review site, aitoolanalysis.com, printed the Creator allowance as 200 credits, which at 20 credits a minute it counted as about 10 minutes of Avatar IV (H-02). Blogrecode’s test rests on the same 200-credit month, which is why its Avatar IV run needed credit packs on top of the plan (SH-03). HeyGen’s pricing page said 600 on August 15, September 22 and October 27 (H-01, SH-01). From outside, Mimo cannot tell whether HeyGen once sold a 200-credit Creator plan or whether both third parties misread the page. What the dates settle is the number a buyer faces today.

So here is the same test scenario re-priced at 600 credits. This is Mimo’s arithmetic, not blogrecode’s, and it rests on three stated assumptions: 100 finished Avatar IV minutes, from 50 videos of a 2-minute script; an Avatar IV video avatar at today’s 31 credits a minute (SH-14); and no retakes beyond what the article counted. A hundred minutes at 31 credits is 3,100 credits. HeyGen’s help center says Creator and Pro cannot buy one-time credits and only Business can (SH-14), so the article’s route, a Creator plan topped up with packs, is not one HeyGen’s current help pages describe. The table prices the routes they do describe, at monthly list prices.

At today’s credit counts and burn rates, the cheapest route, six Creator months at $174, still comes in under half of blogrecode’s $384, so the four-to-one gap belongs to the 200-credit premise, not to HeyGen’s current pricing. HeyGen now prints Creator at $24 a month billed annually (SH-01), but an annual plan commits a buyer to twelve months, so the table sticks to monthly list prices. What survives from the test is the part it got right: the avatar engine moves a HeyGen bill more than the plan does, and an Avatar IV video avatar burns nearly eight times the credits of an Avatar III one, 31 a minute against 4 (SH-14).

The rollover rule is the other trap. HeyGen’s help center says monthly credits roll over for one additional billing cycle; for annual plans, the pricing page says credits accumulate until renewal while the help center describes a monthly allocation (SH-01, SH-14). One Capterra reviewer reported on August 6, 2026 that a rollover-policy change cut more than 3,000 saved credits down to 600 (H-10). That is one account’s experience, not a pattern, but reason enough not to bank more than a cycle’s worth of credits on a monthly plan.

Which Has More Realistic AI Avatars: Synthesia or HeyGen?

HeyGen holds the stronger realism evidence in this record, though not a decisive lead: G2’s avatar-quality category score, as learn.g2.com reported it in April 2026, was 9.2 for HeyGen against 8.2 for Synthesia (SH-07). No realism judgment from a same-script test of both tools passed screening, so read it as a tilt toward HeyGen, not a verdict.

On Synthesia’s side, two independent testers who disclosed their method mark where realism holds. One found clips under about 90 seconds convincing, while pieces of five minutes or more still show tells to an attentive viewer (S-16); the other found occasional uncanny movement in longer videos and weaker AI voices in some non-English languages (S-15). On HeyGen’s side the dated evidence is user-level: a CEO on Capterra in June 2026 praised its high-quality avatars (H-09), and a creator in August 2026 estimated that its Avatar Shots feature lands a great result on the first try about 70% of the time (H-10). US and Japanese marketers should know that an independent review dated May 29, 2026 reports Avatar Shots geoblocked in both countries (H-03). Synthesia’s stock library grows with the plan, from 9 avatars on Basic to 125-plus on Starter, 180-plus on Pro, and 240-plus on Enterprise (SH-02, re-read October 27). The cheapest realism test is your own script on both free plans before any card comes out.

How Many Languages Do Synthesia and HeyGen Support?

Synthesia lists 160-plus languages and accents for its AI voices and 140-plus languages for AI dubbing, two different features on two different vendor pages (SH-06, SH-05). HeyGen lists 175-plus languages and dialects for translation on paid plans and 30-plus on its free plan (H-17, SH-09).

Compare like with like: the dubbing figures are the closest match, 140-plus for Synthesia against 175-plus for HeyGen. HeyGen also meters translation in credits, 6 a minute in Speed mode, 10 in Precision mode and 4 without lip-sync (SH-14), so Creator’s 600 credits cover about 100 Speed-mode minutes, roughly $0.29 each by Mimo’s arithmetic. HeyGen’s count describes languages it translates into; no vendor page in this record confirms how many source languages it can read.

Is Synthesia or HeyGen Better for Corporate Training and Compliance?

Synthesia is the better-documented fit for formal training: its security page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 42001, and GDPR, and its docs name LMS connectors including Docebo, TalentLMS, and a Workday sync (S-06, S-08). HeyGen matches on SOC 2 Type II, which it applies across the whole platform, but claims no ISO 42001 (H-05).

Every row is the vendor’s own statement, captured and dated, not an audit Mimo obtained. The ISO 27701 row corrects a claim that turns up in third-party lists of Synthesia’s certifications: Synthesia’s own security page does not make it, and the likely source of the mix-up is Synthesia’s ISO 42001 announcement, which notes that its auditor holds ISO 27701 accreditation (S-07).

Team size is where both entry plans break for a training department. Synthesia’s Starter and Pro workspaces each hold one editor, with 3 guests on Starter and 5 on Pro (SH-02), so a second course author means a second plan or an Enterprise conversation. HeyGen’s Business plan adds seats at $20 each, but its 1,500 credits are pooled, so extra seats buy colleagues, not output (SH-01, H-16).

Here is what that seat math looks like for a five-author training team. On HeyGen, one Business workspace at $149 a month plus $20 for each added seat keeps all five people inside a single shared pool of 1,500 credits, and any overflow is bought in blocks of 100 credits for $5 (H-01, H-16). On Synthesia, the same five authors cannot all edit inside one Starter or Pro workspace, so the realistic paths are five separate single-user plans or an Enterprise quote, and Synthesia publishes no Enterprise price (S-14, SH-02). Neither vendor makes the five-seat total easy to read off a pricing page, which is why Mimo shows the mechanics here instead of an invented team figure.

Does HeyGen Include SCORM and Translation on Every Plan?

No. HeyGen’s own pricing table, read on September 22 and again on October 27, 2026, ticks SCORM Export only for Business and Enterprise, and its free plan translates into 30-plus languages rather than the paid plans’ 175 (SH-09).

The claim under check is HeyGen’s own. Its Synthesia-comparison page says Synthesia locks SCORM export and one-click translation behind Enterprise, while HeyGen offers SCORM, translation, branching and quizzes from the free plan with no per-feature charge (SH-08). Translation holds up in part, since the free plan does translate, into fewer languages. SCORM does not: the cheapest HeyGen plan with SCORM export is Business at $149 a month (SH-01, SH-09). Synthesia’s help center confirms SCORM 1.2 and 2004 export on Enterprise only (S-09), and its October 27 pricing page still lists SCORM export under Enterprise (SH-02). The two vendors sit closer on this gate than either comparison page suggests, and HeyGen Business is the only published price in this matchup that includes SCORM.

Does Either Platform Use Your Data to Train Its AI?

HeyGen does, by default, for self-serve accounts: its privacy policy lists training and improving its models, avatar creation models included, as a use of customer data, with an opt-out on request, and its trust page says Enterprise customers’ data is excluded (SH-10, SH-11). Synthesia’s privacy policy and security page say nothing either way about training on customer data (SH-12, SH-13).

The HeyGen answer matters because HeyGen’s comparison page tells a different story: its feature grid marks “data not used for AI training” as explicitly guaranteed for HeyGen and not guaranteed for Synthesia (SH-08). HeyGen’s privacy policy, captured the same day, lists the purpose “to train and enhance the models that power our products and services” and adds: “You may request to opt-out of this training and enhancement by contacting us” (SH-10). HeyGen’s trust and safety page supplies the fair reading: Enterprise customers’ data is not used to train its AI systems, and non-Enterprise data may be, unless the user opts out (SH-11). The comparison page may be speaking to Enterprise buyers, but it does not say so, and a Creator, Pro, or Business customer sits outside that exclusion. On a self-serve HeyGen plan with sensitive scripts or footage, send the opt-out request before the first upload.

Synthesia’s side is silence, and silence is all it is. Synthesia’s privacy policy says it processes information about how you use the service “to improve our Platform and underlying technologies and for our internal research”, without addressing customer content as such (SH-12), and its security practices page, re-read for this question alone, says nothing about model training (SH-13). That is neither a guarantee nor an admission. A procurement team that needs a written answer should get one into the contract, and a HeyGen buyer relying on the Enterprise exclusion should do the same.

How Do Synthesia and HeyGen Handle Custom Avatar Consent?

Synthesia and HeyGen both require the real person behind a custom avatar to record a live, identity-matched consent video before the avatar can be built (S-10, H-06). After that step they differ: HeyGen documents remote consent by QR code, a 24-hour link expiry, and a standing right for the depicted person to have their likeness removed (H-06, H-07), while the Synthesia pages captured document an over-18 check but no matching removal right.

Which flow suits a team depends on where the spokesperson is. HeyGen’s QR route lets a presenter far from the creator’s desk consent from a phone, and the 24-hour expiry stops an old link being reused. Synthesia’s live-only rule and age prompt are strict at the front door, and that strictness is the safeguard, not a flaw. If your spokesperson might leave the company, ask Synthesia before signing what happens to their avatar afterward: HeyGen answers that in its moderation policy, and we did not find Synthesia’s answer in the pages captured for either review.

What Do G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot Actually Say About Synthesia vs HeyGen?

On G2, as learn.g2.com reported it, HeyGen edges Synthesia 4.8 to 4.7 (SH-07). Capterra refused a September 22 re-check and Trustpilot blocked every attempt, so neither contributes an average here.

Two cautions attach to the G2 rows. G2 refused Mimo’s direct requests every time, so these are the figures G2’s own content blog printed, published by the company whose data it cites, from research roughly ten months older than this capture. The same article also misstates both free plans, giving Synthesia three minutes a month and HeyGen three-minute videos, where each vendor’s own page showed 10 minutes and one-minute videos (SH-07, SH-02, SH-01). Treat its category scores as a dated snapshot and nothing firmer.

No blended score appears on this page: a tenth of a point, drawn from different reviewer pools, cannot settle a purchase, and the individually dated reviews say more. For Synthesia, a 1-star reviewer in June 2025 cited slow support and flawed content moderation (S-19), and a 3-star reviewer in March 2025 described an unwanted annual renewal that a support bot called non-refundable (S-20). For HeyGen, a 1-star reviewer in April 2026 reported bugs and ineffective support (H-11), while a 5-star reviewer in June 2026 praised the avatars and the tools but wished the support button were easier to find (H-09). Four people are not a user base, and support comes up on both sides; what differs is the second complaint, moderation and renewal billing for Synthesia, bugs for HeyGen.

Is There an API for Synthesia or HeyGen?

Yes, both do, but they sell it in different shapes. HeyGen sells its API as a standalone pay-as-you-go product priced per avatar engine, re-read on October 27, 2026: $0.99 a minute for an Avatar III studio avatar, $4.83 for an Avatar IV studio avatar or digital twin, and $1.50 a minute for lip-synced Precision translation, with no free API credits since February 2026 (H-15, SH-15). Synthesia bills video made through its API from the subscription’s own credit balance, at 160 credits a generated minute against about 100 in the editor, and its pricing page now prints dollar rates for two API products: dubbing at $0.40 a minute, or $0.80 with lip-sync, and Interactive Avatars at $0.10 a minute for the avatar layer alone (SH-02, SH-04).

So the video-API comparison still has to be built by hand. Synthesia’s help center puts Pro at 6,500 credits a month, or 78,000 a year, which is the pricing page’s 6,000 plus the 500 every plan carries (SH-04). Billed yearly, $708 for 78,000 credits is about $0.0091 a credit, so a 160-credit API minute costs about $1.45; on monthly billing, $89 for 6,500 credits puts it at about $2.19. That is Mimo’s arithmetic on Synthesia’s stated rates, and it assumes Pro’s per-credit cost. In September the same help article priced an API minute at 75 credits, below the editor’s 120 at the time (SH-04); an API minute now costs more credits than an editor minute.

For a developer, shape matters more than rate. HeyGen’s $0.99 Avatar III minute undercuts both Synthesia figures and needs no subscription, but its $4.83 Avatar IV minute costs more than twice either one, and pay-as-you-go credits expire 12 months after purchase (H-15, SH-15). Synthesia’s API draws on the same credit pool as your editor work, so heavy API use competes with the team’s own videos.

What If Neither Synthesia nor HeyGen Fits Your Use Case?

If the project needs real-time conversation, cinematic b-roll, or narration without a face, neither Synthesia nor HeyGen is the right fit out of the box. Three jobs point elsewhere:

1. Live, two-way avatar conversations. HeyGen covers this only through a separately billed product, described below.
2. Generated scenes, ads, or b-roll. That is clip-generator work, not presenter video.
3. Voice-only narration. A text-to-speech or dubbing tool is cheaper than paying for an avatar nobody sees.

HeyGen’s real-time option, LiveAvatar, is billed apart from Creator, Pro, and Business credits, and its cheapest paid tier is $19 monthly for 200 credits (H-14). Synthesia now lists Interactive Avatars, real-time conversational avatars billed through its API at $0.10 a minute for the avatar layer, with a full-stack version marked coming soon (SH-02). For the second job, our AI video generator ranking, split into clip and avatar tools sorts those separately. Colossyan, a training-focused avatar tool, and D-ID come up in the same buying conversations; Mimo has not reviewed either under the protocol, so treat them as leads to price against the math above.

If one of the two does fit, the fork is short. Choose Synthesia when the videos live inside formal training: an LMS, an ISO 42001 requirement, a compliance reviewer who wants certifications on file, and a budget that can reach Enterprise for SCORM. Choose HeyGen when Avatar III volume, translation into many languages, or avatar realism decides it; pick the avatar tier on purpose, and send the training opt-out if you are on a self-serve plan. Either way, render your own script on the free plan first.

Limitations

Five limits apply to this comparison specifically. First, the cost section leans on one hands-on test, blogrecode’s, whose totals and credit math do not fully reconcile with each other, and an automated summary of it supplied per-minute prices its text never prints, so Mimo logged only the totals found in the raw page and flags every derived rate as Mimo’s division. Second, the G2 numbers arrive secondhand through G2’s own blog, from research about ten months older than this capture, and Trustpilot printed no figure for either vendor because both pages refused the request. Third, prices, plan gates and credit rates were re-read on October 27, 2026, but the consent, certification, and review evidence was captured on August 13 and 15 and could have shifted, and the prices of HeyGen’s intermediate Pro tiers could not be read. Fourth, the four Capterra reviewers quoted here speak for themselves, not for either customer base, and a review site draws buyers with a strong reaction in either direction, so the praise-to-complaint mix is not a satisfaction rate. Fifth, Mimo generated no video on either platform for this page, so nothing here grades output quality at first hand. Pricing re-checked on October 27, 2026: HeyGen’s plan prices and credit counts were unchanged and its per-minute credit rates had changed, Synthesia had replaced its minute plans with a credit ladder, and every affected figure above was recomputed.

Four passes feed this comparison under the Mimo Evidence Protocol: the Synthesia review’s on August 13, 2026, the HeyGen review’s on August 15, a targeted pass on September 22 that chased the claims only a head-to-head raises, and an October 27 re-read of both vendors’ pricing, credit and API pages. Of 279 candidate sources across the first three passes, 231 were dropped; the counter splits them by reason, and the largest group, 95, repeated a source already on file. What survived is 48 sources holding 54 dated entries, two of them added on October 27 from HeyGen help pages already on file (SH-14, SH-15). Reddit could not be reached from the collection environment in any pass, which is why the user voice here comes from individually dated Capterra reviews instead.