Both entry plans cost $29 a month. That is where the similarity ends, and it is the single most misleading fact in this comparison.
Synthesia's $29 Starter plan gives you 10 video minutes a month. HeyGen's $29 Creator plan gives you 600 credits and lets a single video run up to 30 minutes. Those are not the same unit, they are not the same amount of output, and if you pick based on the price tag alone you will find out which one you needed about three weeks in.
What each plan actually costs
| Feature | HeyGen | Synthesia |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 3 videos/mo, 1 min max | 10 video minutes/mo |
| Entry paid plan | Creator — $29/mo | Starter — $29/mo |
| Entry plan, billed annually | ~$24/mo | ~$22/mo ($264/yr) |
| What the entry plan includes | 600 credits/mo | 10 video minutes/mo |
| Max length of a single video | 30 minutes | Not specified by tier |
| Second tier | Pro — $49/mo, 1,000 credits | Creator — $89/mo, 30 min |
| 4K export | Pro, $49/mo | Not specified by tier |
| Voice cloning | Included at $29 | Not specified by tier |
| Languages | 175+ | Not specified by tier |
| Watermark on entry paid plan | None | Not specified by tier |
| Team plan | Business — $149/mo, +$20/seat | Enterprise — custom |
| Unlimited minutes | Not offered | Enterprise — custom |
Prices checked 20 August 2026. Two honest caveats before you read anything into that table. "Not specified by tier" means the figure was not published against the plans we compared — it does not mean the feature is missing, and you should not read a blank as a loss. And HeyGen's per-minute cost is genuinely unknowable from the pricing page, for a reason we get to below.
The credits problem
Synthesia sells minutes. You can divide.
- Starter: $29 ÷ 10 minutes = $2.90 per minute
- Starter billed annually: $264/yr, or $22/mo ÷ 10 = $2.20 per minute
- Creator: $89 ÷ 30 minutes = $2.97 per minute
- Creator billed annually: $804/yr, or $67/mo ÷ 30 = $2.23 per minute
Two things fall out of that arithmetic immediately. Annual billing takes about 24% off, which is a real discount. But moving from Starter to Creator — tripling your spend — buys you exactly no efficiency. You pay roughly $2.20 a minute either way. The upgrade sells you volume, not a better rate. If your monthly output is under 10 minutes, there is no argument for the $89 plan at all.
HeyGen sells credits, and you cannot do that division. 600 credits is not 600 anything you can plan around, because how many credits a minute costs depends on which avatar model you generate with — and the more realistic models cost more. Two people on the same $29 plan can get very different amounts of finished video out of it.
That is not a dealbreaker, but it is the thing to nail down before you subscribe. Find the credit cost per minute for the specific avatar model you intend to use, multiply by your monthly output, and check it lands under 600. Do that arithmetic before the card comes out, not after.
Check HeyGen's current credit rates →Run it against your actual cadence
The plan that fits depends on one number: how many finished minutes you publish a month.
One 5-minute video a week — about 20 minutes a month. Synthesia Starter's 10 minutes does not cover half of it, so you are on the $89 Creator plan, or $67 billed annually. On HeyGen you are inside the 30-minute per-video ceiling comfortably, and the question is only whether 600 credits stretches to 20 minutes on your chosen model.
Two or three shorts a week — maybe 6 to 10 minutes a month. Synthesia Starter fits, barely, with nothing spare for the takes you throw away. And you will throw takes away.
One long piece a month — a 20-minute training module or explainer. HeyGen's 30-minute ceiling covers it on the $29 plan. On Synthesia you need Creator's 30 minutes at $89, and the whole month's allowance goes into that one video.
Notice how often the answer turns on re-records rather than final output. Nobody's first generation is the one they publish. If your allowance only covers your finished minutes, your real allowance is smaller than it looks.
Where each one is actually aimed
These tools are not competing for the same buyer, whatever the matching $29 suggests.
HeyGen is built for output that goes outward — social video, marketing, ads, AI presenters, personal avatars, podcast-style pieces. Voice cloning and 175+ languages sit on the entry plan, which tells you who they expect to be paying: someone shipping a lot of short public-facing video, in more than one language, without a procurement department.
Synthesia is built for output that goes inward — employee training, onboarding, internal comms, corporate and educational video, LMS delivery. The minute-based pricing and the jump straight from Creator to custom-priced Enterprise point the same direction. It is a company tool that individuals sometimes wander into.
That difference explains the pricing shapes. HeyGen's ladder — $29, $49, $149 with $20 seats — is designed for one person who might later become a small team. Synthesia's — $29, $89, then call us — is designed for a team that will eventually have a budget conversation.
See Synthesia's plans →What we could not check
We are being explicit about this rather than writing around it.
This comparison is built on published pricing, not on hands-on output testing. We have not put the same script through both tools and compared how the avatars actually look, where the lip-sync drifts, or how either one handles an awkward proper noun. Those are the differences that decide whether you keep paying in month three, and nothing here measures them.
We also have not verified HeyGen's credit-per-minute rate for each avatar model, which — as covered above — is the number that makes its pricing legible. And we have not collected user reports on either tool. When we quote people, the quotes will be real and linked; there are none here because we have not gathered them yet.
Treat this as a pricing analysis that is accurate on the numbers and honest about its edges, not as a verdict on video quality.
Which one to buy
Buy HeyGen if you are an individual creator or marketer. The $29 plan carries voice cloning, no watermark, 175+ languages and a 30-minute video ceiling, and the next rung up is $49 rather than $89. Confirm the credit rate for your model first.
Buy Synthesia if you are producing structured internal content — training, onboarding, compliance — inside a company. Minute-based pricing is easier to defend in a budget line than credits, the free tier's 10 minutes is enough to genuinely evaluate it, and Enterprise's unlimited minutes is a real endpoint if this becomes core to how you train people.
Buy neither yet if you are still deciding whether AI video belongs in your workflow at all. Synthesia's free tier gives you 10 minutes a month, which is enough to find out. HeyGen's free tier caps each video at one minute, so it will tell you what an avatar looks like but not how one holds up across a real piece.
And if you are planning to generate video programmatically from your own product, ignore this entire article. Compare the API pricing and the cost per generated minute instead — the subscription tiers above have almost nothing to say about that case.