InVideo vs Synthesia vs AdsGen compared as AI video tools

Both companies sell you a monthly allowance, and the allowances are measured in units that do not convert. Synthesia counts finished video minutes. Its own FAQ spells out what that buys: a Starter plan is 10 video minutes a month, so "you can generate 10 videos which are 1:00 minutes long, or 1 video which is 10:00 minutes long." You can plan a quarter of content against that before you enter a card.

InVideo counts credits, and a credit is not a fixed unit of output. Its pricing FAQ states that generative models are charged at their original API pricing, that unused credits do not roll over to the next month, and that InVideo reserves the right to update credit costs at any time without prior notice. So the same 2,000 credits buy wildly different amounts of finished video depending on which model you pick, and the exchange rate can move mid-subscription. InVideo's plan cards now give worked examples, about 800 Nano Banana Pro images or 56 Seedance 2 generations on Plus, and the pricing page publishes Seedance rates of about 30 to 50 credits per 5 seconds. That lets you estimate the footage: 30 seconds of generation alone comes to roughly 180 to 300 credits, or about $5.40 to $9.00 at the 3.0 cents a credit that monthly Plus and Max work out to (our estimate, before voice, lip sync or retries). It is still an estimate rather than an allowance, because the vendor can reprice the models, and a generated clip is not a finished video.

Buried in Synthesia's pricing FAQ is a rule most reviews never mention: "We only count new video seconds. Example: If you edit an existing 1-minute video and change 3 seconds of it, we will only charge you for 3 seconds."

That single sentence changes how a small allowance behaves. Ten minutes a month sounds thin until you realize that revising last quarter's onboarding video, swapping a product name, or updating a price costs you seconds rather than a full re-render. For any team maintaining a library of videos rather than shipping new ones every week, Synthesia's effective capacity is far higher than the headline number. The mirror image is also true, and it is why the two tools suit different work: on InVideo, every regeneration spends credits again at full rate, because there is no concept of an unchanged frame you already paid for.

Read both pages carefully and each one has a wrinkle worth knowing before you commit to a year.

InVideo's page loads with the annual toggle already on, so the first figures you see are annual prices divided by twelve. The discount varies by plan: nothing on the $20 Starter plan, 17% on Plus, 33% on Max and 39% on Max 3x. On Max the page disagrees with itself, showing $100 a month and "Save $579" on the card and $101 in the compare table, while the arithmetic ($1,206 a year against twelve payments of $150) gives $100.50 a month and a $594 saving. There is no Free plan card, yet a Free plan exists in the product with a weekly quota and watermarked exports, and it is what you are downgraded to when you cancel, at which point unused paid credits expire. Credits do roll over in one specific case, when you upgrade to a higher plan, which is the opposite of the month-to-month rule and easy to misread. InVideo's help center billing pages and its iOS app still list older lineups, so treat the web pricing page as the one that applies.

Synthesia's page contradicts itself on annual totals. Read live on August 15, 2026, the plan cards priced annual Starter at $216 a year and annual Creator at $768, while the FAQ further down the same page states "For Starter plan users, Synthesia costs $29 per month or $264 if you go with an annual plan" and "$89/month or $804/year if you pay annually." That is a $48 gap on one plan and $36 on the other. Neither figure is hidden and we are not suggesting anything underhand, but if you are budgeting from a screenshot, take it from the checkout rather than the marketing page. There is also a metering split worth flagging: on monthly billing the allowance is quoted per month, on annual billing the identical capacity is quoted as 120 or 360 minutes per year.

Pick Synthesia if your output is scripted, informational and repetitive: training modules, product walkthroughs, internal updates, anything that needs to exist in eleven languages and land in an LMS. The forecastable minute meter, the new-seconds-only rule and the enterprise plumbing are all pointed at that job, and nothing else in this comparison does it as well.

Pick InVideo if your output changes shape constantly and you want one bill instead of five. Monthly Plus at $60 is the sensible way to test the shelf, since it costs 3.0 cents a credit against 5.0 cents on the $20 Starter plan, which also caps the models. Just budget on your real model mix rather than the headline credit count, and check the per-model rate before signing an annual term.

Pick neither if what you actually need is advertising. Both will render a person talking, which is the surface of a UGC ad, but neither picks the angle, writes the spoken hook or sizes the file for a specific placement. That is the gap AdsGen was built to close: paste a product URL and it writes up to 20 script variations across 6 angles, each with a hook, then renders the one you pick with a creator who reads as a real person filming on a phone, as a native 9:16 video with captions already burned in. Fewer models than InVideo and none of Synthesia's enterprise reach, deliberately, in exchange for a price you know in advance: script batches plus a fixed number of rendered videos each month.