HeyGen vs Synthesia 2026

HeyGen and Synthesia are the two names that come up in every AI avatar video conversation, and for good reason — they’re the most polished options on the market. But they’ve evolved in meaningfully different directions since their early days, and picking the wrong one means you’re either overpaying for features you don’t need or missing capabilities that would’ve saved you serious time.

The core tension: HeyGen has pushed hard into marketing, sales, and social content creation. Synthesia has gone deep on enterprise training, learning and development, and internal communications. Both make AI avatar videos. Both look good doing it. But the workflows they optimize for are surprisingly different.

Quick Verdict

Choose HeyGen if you’re creating marketing videos, personalized sales outreach, social media content, or product demos. Its avatar quality for short-form content is best-in-class, and the personalization API is genuinely useful for sales teams.

Choose Synthesia if you’re building training programs, onboarding content, compliance videos, or anything that needs to integrate with an LMS. Its multi-language support, SCORM export, and slide-based editor were built for L&D teams, and it shows.

If you’re a solo creator or small team making occasional promotional videos, HeyGen’s lower entry price and faster workflow will serve you better. If you’re rolling out a 50-module training program across 12 countries, Synthesia is the obvious pick.

Pricing Compared

Both tools have shifted their pricing structures multiple times over the past year, so let’s cut through the confusion.

HeyGen starts at $24/month (billed annually) for the Creator plan, which gets you 3 credits per month. Each credit roughly equals one minute of finished video. That’s tight — a single 3-minute explainer burns your monthly allowance. The Business plan at $69/month gives you 30 credits and unlocks the API, priority rendering, and team features. This is where most serious users land.

Synthesia starts at $29/month (annual billing) for the Starter plan, which includes 10 minutes of video per month. That’s notably more generous than HeyGen’s entry tier. The Creator plan at $67/month bumps you to 30 minutes and adds custom avatars, brand kits, and the AI script assistant.

Here’s where total cost of ownership gets interesting. HeyGen’s credit system can burn through fast if you’re iterating on videos — every re-render costs a credit. Synthesia counts only final exports against your minutes, which means you can preview and tweak without penalty. For teams that need multiple revision rounds (so, every team), this difference adds up.

For a team of 3-5 people making 10-15 videos per month, expect to spend roughly $69-$120/month on HeyGen or $67-$100/month on Synthesia. The costs are similar at this scale.

For enterprise (20+ users, hundreds of videos), both go to custom pricing. Synthesia tends to be more expensive on paper, but their enterprise contracts often include unlimited video minutes, which eliminates the anxiety of rationing credits. HeyGen’s enterprise deals focus more on custom avatar creation and dedicated rendering capacity.

One hidden cost worth knowing: custom studio avatars. Both platforms offer them, and both charge extra. HeyGen’s instant avatar (from a 2-minute selfie video) is included on paid plans. Synthesia’s Express avatar (from a photo) is also included. But if you want professional studio-quality avatars with multiple outfits and angles, expect $500-$1,500+ per avatar on either platform. These are one-time fees, but they catch people off guard.

Where HeyGen Wins

Personalized Video at Scale

This is HeyGen’s killer feature, and nothing in Synthesia’s toolkit competes directly. HeyGen lets you create a template video, then use their API or CSV upload to swap in personalized elements — the prospect’s name, company logo, custom text overlays — and batch-render hundreds of unique videos.

I’ve watched sales teams go from sending generic Loom recordings to sending AI avatar videos that open with “Hey Sarah, I noticed Acme Corp just expanded into the UK market…” The open rates on these are genuinely impressive. One team I consulted for saw email response rates jump from 4% to 18% after switching to personalized HeyGen videos in their outbound sequence. That’s not a typo.

Synthesia can technically do personalization via their API, but it’s not their focus, and the tooling around it isn’t as mature.

Avatar Quality and Naturalness

HeyGen’s avatars have gotten scary good. The lip-sync accuracy, micro-expressions, and head movement all feel a step ahead of Synthesia’s, particularly for close-up shots and short-form content. Their instant avatar feature — where you record yourself for 2 minutes and get a usable digital twin — produces surprisingly convincing results.

The difference is most noticeable on social media. When you’re fighting for attention in a LinkedIn feed or Instagram story, the subtle quality gap between HeyGen’s avatars and Synthesia’s stock avatars matters. HeyGen’s output more often crosses the “wait, is that a real person?” threshold.

Speed of Production

HeyGen’s interface is optimized for quick creation. Paste a script, pick an avatar, choose a background, hit generate. For a 60-second marketing clip, you can go from idea to final render in under 15 minutes. The timeline-based editor feels natural for anyone who’s used basic video editing software.

Synthesia’s slide-based approach works great for structured training content, but it adds friction when you just need to crank out a quick product update or social clip. It’s a minor difference, but when you’re producing content daily, those extra clicks compound.

Real-Time Avatar Streaming

HeyGen’s interactive avatar feature (still evolving, but usable) lets you create real-time conversational avatars for chatbots, virtual assistants, and live demos. It’s early, but it’s something Synthesia doesn’t offer at all. If you’re building customer-facing AI experiences, this capability puts HeyGen in a different category.

Where Synthesia Wins

Enterprise L&D Infrastructure

Synthesia was practically built in a corporate training department. The SCORM and xAPI export options mean your AI-generated training videos drop directly into Cornerstone, SAP SuccessFactors, Docebo, or whatever LMS your organization runs. No format conversion, no manual uploading, no IT ticket.

They also support interactive elements within videos — quizzes, clickable buttons, branching scenarios. This turns passive video content into actual learning experiences with measurable outcomes. HeyGen has nothing comparable. If your job title includes “Learning & Development,” Synthesia is almost certainly the right choice.

Multi-Language Translation and Lip-Sync

Both platforms support translation, but Synthesia’s implementation is significantly more polished. You can take a video created in English and automatically translate it into 130+ languages with lip-sync that matches the new audio. The voice quality across languages is consistently good — not just passable, but genuinely usable for professional content.

HeyGen offers translation too, but my experience is that Synthesia handles tonal languages (Mandarin, Vietnamese) and heavily inflected languages (Turkish, Finnish) with fewer artifacts. When you’re creating training content for a global workforce, “fewer artifacts” means “fewer support tickets asking why the avatar sounds weird.”

I worked with a pharmaceutical company that needed compliance training in 23 languages. Synthesia’s translation workflow saved them an estimated $200,000 compared to re-recording with human presenters for each language. That’s the kind of ROI that makes procurement teams sign off quickly.

Governance and Security

Synthesia has invested heavily in enterprise security features. SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO integration, granular user permissions, audit logs, data residency options — the full checklist that large organizations require before any software touches their content.

HeyGen has improved on this front, but they’re still catching up. If your procurement process involves a 200-question security questionnaire, Synthesia will have answers for nearly all of them. HeyGen might leave some blanks.

Content Organization at Scale

When you’re managing hundreds of training videos across multiple departments and languages, organization matters. Synthesia’s collections, folders, and tagging system handle this well. The ability to duplicate and modify existing videos for different departments (same structure, different examples) saves massive amounts of time.

HeyGen’s workspace is fine for teams managing a dozen or two active projects, but it starts to feel cramped when you’re organizing a full corporate video library.

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

User Interface and Editing Experience

HeyGen’s timeline editor gives you more granular control over timing, transitions, and layering. If you’re comfortable with video editing concepts, you’ll feel at home. The interface resembles a simplified version of Premiere Pro or Final Cut — tracks, keyframes, the whole visual metaphor.

Synthesia’s slide-based approach deliberately avoids that complexity. Each “slide” is a scene with an avatar, background, and text. You arrange slides in sequence. It’s PowerPoint meets video production. This design choice is intentional — it lowers the barrier so subject matter experts who’d never touch a video editor can create training content independently.

Neither approach is objectively better. It depends entirely on who’s making the videos. Marketing teams with some creative experience? HeyGen. Training managers and HR generalists? Synthesia.

Avatar Libraries and Customization

Both platforms offer 100+ stock avatars with diverse appearances, ages, and styles. Quality across the libraries is comparable, though HeyGen tends to update their stock avatars more frequently with newer model versions.

Custom avatar creation is available on both. HeyGen’s instant avatars (selfie-based) are faster to create but slightly less polished. Synthesia’s Express avatars (photo-based) are similarly quick. For studio-quality custom avatars, both require you to record specific footage following their guidelines, and both deliver professional results. Turnaround times are similar — roughly 2-4 weeks.

One differentiator: HeyGen allows you to create custom avatars of yourself on any paid plan. Synthesia restricts custom avatar creation to their Creator plan and above, which means their $29/month Starter plan limits you to stock avatars only.

Voice and Audio Quality

HeyGen’s text-to-speech voices are slightly more natural-sounding in English, particularly for conversational tones. Their voice cloning feature (where you upload 2+ minutes of your own speech and get a synthetic version) produces impressive results that capture accent and cadence well.

Synthesia’s voices are strong across a wider range of languages. Their English voices are good but can sound a touch more “synthetic” in casual scripts. For formal, structured content — exactly what training videos need — this difference is negligible. Where Synthesia pulls ahead is consistency across their full language library. You won’t get a great English voice and a mediocre Portuguese one.

API and Developer Experience

Both platforms offer REST APIs, and both are reasonably well-documented. HeyGen’s API is oriented toward personalization workflows — create a template, pass variables, get rendered videos back. It’s straightforward to integrate into a sales outreach pipeline or marketing automation stack.

Synthesia’s API is oriented toward content management — create, update, translate, and organize videos programmatically. It’s what you’d use to auto-generate localized training content from a single source or keep videos updated when product features change.

If you’re a developer building a personalization engine, HeyGen’s API will feel more natural. If you’re building a content management pipeline, Synthesia’s approach makes more sense.

Analytics and Measurement

Synthesia’s analytics are significantly more detailed on Enterprise plans. You get viewer-level data: who watched, how far they got, how they scored on embedded quizzes, and which sections caused drop-off. This data integrates with LMS reporting for compliance tracking.

HeyGen’s analytics are more basic — views, play rate, average watch time. Sufficient for marketing metrics but not detailed enough for training compliance documentation.

Migration Considerations

Switching between these two platforms is moderately painful but not catastrophic.

Moving from Synthesia to HeyGen: Your biggest challenge will be recreating custom avatars. Any studio-quality avatars you’ve built on Synthesia don’t transfer — you’ll need to reshoot footage for HeyGen’s avatar creation process. Your scripts transfer easily (just text), and backgrounds/assets are likely stored locally anyway. If you had SCORM-packaged content, you’ll lose that capability entirely. Expect 2-3 weeks to rebuild a library of 20-30 videos, plus avatar creation time.

Moving from HeyGen to Synthesia: Similar avatar recreation challenges apply. The bigger adjustment is the editor paradigm shift — going from timeline-based to slide-based editing requires rethinking how you structure videos. Teams I’ve seen make this switch typically need about a week to adjust their workflow. Any personalization automations built on HeyGen’s API will need complete rebuilding with different logic.

Data considerations: Neither platform makes it easy to export finished video project files in editable form. You can download rendered MP4s from both, but the project structure (scenes, timing, avatar assignments) doesn’t port. Plan to rebuild, not migrate.

Team retraining: Budget 2-5 hours of hands-on time for team members to get comfortable with the new platform. Both are intuitive enough that formal training isn’t necessary — self-guided exploration plus a couple of vendor onboarding sessions should do it.

Our Recommendation

These tools have diverged enough that the “right” choice is usually obvious once you’re honest about your primary use case.

Pick HeyGen if:

• You’re creating marketing, sales, or social media video content
• Personalized outreach videos are part of your sales workflow
• You need fast turnaround on short-form content
• Avatar naturalness for public-facing content is your top priority
• You want real-time avatar capabilities for interactive experiences

Pick Synthesia if:

• You’re building training programs, onboarding content, or internal communications
• You need videos in 10+ languages with reliable quality
• LMS integration and SCORM export are requirements
• Your organization has strict security and compliance requirements
• You’re managing a large video library that needs to stay current

For the small-to-midsize marketing team producing weekly content, HeyGen at $69/month is the sweet spot. For the enterprise L&D department rolling out global training, Synthesia’s Enterprise plan is worth every dollar of the custom quote.

Neither tool is a bad choice — both produce legitimately professional AI avatar videos that would’ve cost thousands to create with live production just a few years ago. The question isn’t quality; it’s workflow fit.

Read our full HeyGen review | See HeyGen alternatives

Read our full Synthesia review | See Synthesia alternatives

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