InVideo vs HeyGen vs AdsGen: AI video tools compared

Both companies meter in credits, so it is tempting to compare the headline counts and stop. That comparison misses the rule that actually decides what you pay over a year, which is what happens to credits you did not spend.

HeyGen lists credit rollover as a feature from the $29 Creator plan upward. Monthly subscribers carry unused credits into one additional month, and annual subscribers accumulate them to the renewal date. InVideo's pricing FAQ is explicit in the other direction: unused credits do not roll over to the next month, on every tier, including the $900 Elite plan. Nothing about that is hidden, but it is in the FAQ rather than on the plan card, and it changes the math badly for anyone whose workload is lumpy. If you produce in bursts around launches and go quiet in between, an InVideo plan sized for your busy month is money burned in every quiet one. Size it for the quiet months instead and you are buying top-ups at exactly the moment you are busiest.

A credit is only meaningful if you know what it buys. HeyGen publishes per-minute burn rates: roughly 3 credits a minute for standard avatar generation and around 20 a minute for its most realistic avatar models, with dubbing and lip-synced translation quoted separately. That is a seven-fold swing set by a single quality setting, which is worth knowing, but it is knowable. You can put 600 credits against those rates and work out what a month of Creator actually produces before you pay.

InVideo cannot give you that number, by design. Its FAQ states that generative models are priced differently and that all models are available at their original API pricing, so a credit buys wildly different amounts of output depending on which of the 200+ models you pick. It also reserves the right to update credit costs at any time without prior notice. If you commit to an annual plan at $200 or $10,800, you are committing to a fixed price against an exchange rate the vendor can move. That is not a trap so much as a structural consequence of reselling other companies' compute, and InVideo is upfront about it. It does mean forecasting a cost per finished video is a genuinely different exercise on each platform.

InVideo wins on range, and it is not close. All four paid tiers unlock the same shelf of 200+ image, video, audio and music models, including Veo 3.1, Kling 3, Seedance 2.5 and Eleven Labs music, plus stock from iStock and Storyblocks and unwatermarked exports on every plan including the $17 entry. If your output changes shape week to week, one metered subscription replaces several narrow ones.

HeyGen wins on the specific job of putting a believable person on screen saying your words, and on letting you find that out for free. Its free plan gives 3 videos a month, 500+ stock digital twins and one custom twin, which is a real evaluation rather than a watermarked teaser. InVideo's cheapest way in is $200 up front on the annual toggle. HeyGen also goes places InVideo does not try to: 175+ languages with lip-synced translation, SCORM export, LMS integrations and SSO, which is why it turns up in enterprise training stacks. Note the asymmetry on avatars, because it runs against price intuition. InVideo Plus at $17 a month gives you 4 avatars. HeyGen's free plan gives 500+ stock twins, and $29 adds unlimited photo avatars.

Pick InVideo if your work is varied, you want to test what frontier models can do, and you would rather hold one metered subscription than five. Budget against your real model mix rather than the headline credit count, and treat the annual price as a commitment against a rate that can move. Pick HeyGen if the output is a person delivering a script, especially across languages, or if a training or internal-comms team needs SCORM and SSO. Start on its free plan, measure your actual credit burn for a week, then buy the tier that matches.

There is a third case where neither fits. Both tools assume you already know what the video should say. For a performance marketer that assumption is the whole problem, because the shortage is never rendering capacity, it is angles that have not been burned out yet. That is the gap AdsGen was built for: paste a product URL and it picks the angle, writes the spoken hook, casts a creator who reads as a real person filming on a phone, and returns native 9:16 ads with the captions already burned in. Far fewer models than InVideo and none of HeyGen's enterprise surface area, deliberately, in exchange for ads you can upload the same afternoon.