MakeUGC vs HeyGen vs AdsGen: AI UGC ad tools compared

This is the whole comparison in one line, so it is worth being precise about it.

HeyGen publishes a burn rate on its own pricing page and it is unusually plain. Studio avatar videos cost 3 credits a minute on the Avatar III engine and 20 credits a minute on Avatar IV and V. Audio dubbing is 2 credits a minute, full lip synced translation is 5, and Video Agent is 20. From that you can price a real deliverable without opening an account. A 30 second talking creator ad on Avatar IV is 10 credits. The $29 Creator plan carries 600 credits, so it buys roughly 60 of those ads a month at about 48 cents each. Drop to Avatar III and the same clip is 1.5 credits, so the same plan buys 400 of them at about 7 cents. That is a 6.7x swing in unit cost driven by a dropdown, which is worth knowing before you commit.

MakeUGC publishes nothing equivalent. Its FAQ says only that each generation "costs a set number of credits depending on the model, duration, and resolution", and no rate table appears anywhere on the pricing page. So the 500 credits on the $59 Startup plan cannot honestly be converted into a number of finished ads. We have now checked this on three separate occasions across 2026 and the answer has not changed. Reviews that quote a MakeUGC cost per video are guessing, and you should treat the number accordingly.

The per credit arithmetic still tells you something. MakeUGC Startup is 11.8 cents a credit, Growth is 7.9, and Pro at its published floor is 7.4. HeyGen Creator is 4.8 cents and Pro is 4.9. But a HeyGen credit and a MakeUGC credit are not the same unit of anything, so the honest reading is not "HeyGen is 2.4x cheaper", it is "HeyGen is the only one of the two you can model".

HeyGen's Pro plan is advertised at $49 a month, and almost every roundup stops there. Its FAQ finishes the sentence: Pro "tiers range from 1,000 credits/mo at $49 to 100,000 credits/mo at $4,300". The same FAQ adds that "all Pro tiers include the same features: only the monthly credit allocation changes."

Two things follow, and both matter to a buyer.

First, the volume discount is almost nothing. At the bottom rung you pay 4.9 cents a credit. At the top rung, after an 88x increase in spend, you pay 4.3 cents. That is a 12 percent break for two orders of magnitude more commitment. Most metered software gives you far more than that, and if you are planning to scale on HeyGen it means the price grows very nearly in a straight line with usage.

Second, and more quietly, the compare table lists user seats as 1 on Free, Creator and Pro. Because every Pro tier carries identical features, that single seat applies at $4,300 a month as much as it does at $49. A team spending fifty thousand dollars a year on HeyGen Pro still shares one login unless they move to Business at $149 plus $20 a seat, which resets the credit allowance down to 1,500. MakeUGC does not publish a seat count on its platform plans at all, which is its own kind of answer: assume one and ask before you buy.

Both companies have a $149 a month plan, and putting them side by side is instructive.

MakeUGC Pro is $149 for a slider offering 2,000, 3,000 or 5,000 credits, with only the floor rung priced in public. It adds product in hand video, Video Agent and PDF to Video, and it is the plan MakeUGC pushes hardest with a $1 first month.

HeyGen Business is $149 for 1,500 credits plus $20 a seat. Here is the part worth noticing: at 1,500 credits for $149 you are paying 9.9 cents a credit, against 4.9 cents on the $49 Pro plan. HeyGen's dearer plan is twice as expensive per unit of work. That is not a mistake on their part, it is what the plan is for. Business buys SAML and SSO, centralized billing, five custom digital twins, video draft commenting, interactive video with quizzes and branching, SCORM export, LMS integrations, connectors for n8n, Make, HubSpot and Zapier, 60 minute videos and twice the concurrency of Pro. None of that is creative volume, and none of it helps you ship more ads.

So if you are buying HeyGen to make ads, Business is the wrong plan even though it is the one that looks like a team plan. Pro at $49, or the tier of Pro that matches your volume, is the ad buyer's rung.

Ad production is lumpy. You burn through creative before a launch and barely touch the tool the month after. How each vendor handles that gap is a real cost difference that no feature grid captures.

MakeUGC states it plainly: credits "refresh each billing cycle and do not roll over", and "unused credits expire at the end of the month". A quiet month is money gone. On a plan where you also do not know what a credit buys, that is uncomfortable, because you cannot size your plan to your actual demand and you cannot bank a buffer.

HeyGen rolls over in both directions. Monthly subscribers carry unused credits for one extra month. Annual subscribers accumulate credits all the way to their renewal date, which effectively turns an annual HeyGen plan into a yearly budget rather than twelve monthly ones. The one hard edge: nothing survives cancellation, and HeyGen says so directly.

For a team running a small number of large campaigns rather than a steady weekly drip, that difference can be worth more than the headline price gap.

The clearest evidence that this is a category mismatch is that neither company's plan table contains the other's headline features.

MakeUGC's pricing page is organized around advertising. Product in hand video so the creator holds your actual product. Batch mode for testing many creatives at once. A B-roll generator, an image generator, an ad toolkit, custom AI avatars, and an AI media buyer on the Enterprise tier. Its creator library is described as 1,000 plus realistic AI creators, and realism of the person is the thing it sells hardest.

HeyGen's compare table has whole sections MakeUGC does not attempt: Learning and Development, with interactive video, video link embedding, quizzes, branching and decisioning, and SCORM export. Video Translation and Languages, with 175 languages and dialects, a brand glossary, transcription upload and a proofreadable translation script. Privacy and Security, with SAML, SSO, SCIM, audit logs and enforced two factor. That is a stack built for a company that needs the same training video in fourteen markets, not for someone testing twelve hooks on Meta.

HeyGen makes excellent talking avatar footage and plenty of advertisers use it. But you are buying a corporate video platform and using a corner of it, and you pay for the rest whether you use it or not.

Choose HeyGen if you need to forecast a cost per finished video before you spend, if a free tier to test with matters, if you want credits that survive a quiet month, or if the same footage has to work as training or localized content as well as advertising. It is the more transparent purchase and the cheaper one per unit of avatar time. Buy Pro at the tier that matches your volume, not Business, unless you specifically need seats and SSO.

Choose MakeUGC if the deliverable is ad creative and nothing else, if the person on screen has to hold your product, if you want the biggest realistic creator library at the entry tier, and if batch testing is your workflow. Go in knowing that you cannot budget it precisely from public information and that unused credits die at the end of the month, so start on the cheapest plan that clears your minimum and size up once you have measured your own burn rate.

Choose AdsGen if the missing piece is the ad itself rather than the rendering. Both of the tools above hand you a studio and wait for a script. AdsGen takes your product URL, picks a proven angle, writes the hook and the script, casts a creator, and returns a batch of native 9:16 ads with burned in captions, sized for Meta, TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Plans are public, counted in finished ads rather than credits, and start at $82 a month, which is less than a single clip from a human creator.