Both start around $29/month, both make talking-head videos from text — but HeyGen and Synthesia are optimized for different buyers, and picking wrong gets expensive. The short version:
| HeyGen | Synthesia | |
|---|---|---|
| Avatar style | More expressive, micro-gestures (Avatar IV) | Deliberately neutral, consistent |
| Languages | 175+ | 160+ (240+ avatars) |
| Pricing model | Credits per video | Minutes per month |
| Entry cost/min | Higher once credits run out | Typically 15–25% cheaper |
| Wins at | Marketing, social, video translation | Training, compliance, scale |
Verified 2026-07-03. Both vendors change plans frequently — confirm on official pricing pages.
Avatar quality: expressive vs consistent
HeyGen's Avatar IV generation moves more like a person — head tilts, micro-expressions, hand gestures — which reads great in short marketing clips. Synthesia's avatars are intentionally calmer: for a compliance module recorded across six months, video #1 and video #20 must look identical, and that consistency is exactly what enterprise L&D teams buy.
The pricing trap
This is where most buyers get burned. Synthesia sells minutes per month — the math is direct and budgetable. HeyGen sells credits, and premium avatar output consumes them fast: one published side-by-side test produced the same ~50 minutes of finished video for $384 on HeyGen vs $95 on Synthesia. If you produce long-form at volume, model the cost per finished minute before committing.
Where HeyGen is clearly better
Video translation with voice cloning — take one video, ship it in dozens of languages with your own voice — remains HeyGen's killer feature for marketing teams. Its avatars also survive the "would I stop scrolling" test better on social.
Verdict
Marketing and social content, translation-heavy workflows, expressiveness: HeyGen. Corporate training, compliance and predictable budgets at scale: Synthesia. If what you actually need is editing recorded humans rather than avatars, Descript is the tool you are looking for.