HeyGen review: HeyGen reviews, pricing and is it worth it for ad teams

HeyGen is worth paying for if your video is a person talking to camera and you need a lot of it. The Avatar IV and Avatar V engines are as convincing as anything on the market, a digital twin of your founder or a real spokesperson is a genuine asset, and 175 languages on every paid plan makes localisation almost free. On the numbers, a 30-second ad on the Avatar IV video look costs 15.5 credits, which is 75 cents on Creator and 62 cents on annual billing. We have not priced a realistic presenter cheaper anywhere.

The qualifier is the plan. Creator and the Pro rungs are fairly priced. Business is not, if what you are buying is output: it carries 1,500 credits for $149 a month, and the Pro rung at exactly the same $149 carries 3,000. Buy Business for what it adds, which is covered below, and never as the way to get more video.

The other qualifier is the job. HeyGen renders the script you bring. If your bottleneck is deciding what the ad should say and testing ten different angles against one offer, the tool is solving the easy half of your problem.

HeyGen bills in credits and publishes the burn rate per minute of finished video in its billing help centre. That is more than most of this category does, and it makes the arithmetic possible.

The rates are 4 credits a minute on Avatar III with a video look and 7 with a photo look, 16 on Avatar IV with a photo look and 31 with a video look, and 48 on Avatar V. Custom Expressive Motion adds another 40 a minute on top of Avatar IV. Video Agent, which writes and assembles the video for you, costs 40 a minute in standard mode and 120 in Seedance mode.

So the same 30-second ad costs 2 credits or 35.5 depending on two choices made inside the editor, not on your plan. On Creator's 600 credits that is anything from 300 ads to 16. Budget on the engine you will actually ship, which for paid social is usually Avatar IV with a video look, and HeyGen charges only for the seconds of avatar actually generated.

One warning for anyone reading other reviews first. Several third-party HeyGen pricing guides still quote 20 credits a minute for Avatar IV and V. HeyGen's own help centre says 16, 31 and 48. Some one-star reviewers describe exactly that jump, from 20 to 48 on Avatar V, so plan on the current table, not on an article from spring.

This is the finding that should decide most purchases, and it comes straight off HeyGen's own pricing page. The Pro plan is a slider with eleven published rungs. Its 3,000-credit rung costs $149 a month. Business also costs $149 a month and carries 1,500 credits. Same price, half the credits: Business works out at 10.1 credits per dollar against 20.1 on that Pro rung and 20.7 on Creator.

Adding people does not close the gap. HeyGen's help centre is explicit that purchasing additional seats does not increase your credits, and the pool is shared between all members. Five people on Business cost $229 a month if the $149 includes the first seat, as the page's 1 plus seats line suggests, and they share 1,500 credits, which is 96 Avatar IV ads between them. Five people on their own Creator accounts cost $145 and have 3,000 credits between them.

What Business actually adds is real, just not capacity: SAML and SSO, a shared workspace, videos up to 60 minutes instead of 30, twice Pro's concurrency, five custom video avatars, SCORM and LMS export, and the ability to top up at 5 cents a credit instead of moving up a tier. Note that SCIM user provisioning is listed under Enterprise, not Business. If you need governance, buy Business knowingly. If you need more ads, buy a Pro rung.

HeyGen publishes all eleven Pro rungs, from 1,000 credits at $49 to 100,000 at $4,300 a month. Divide each one and the volume discount is thin: 20.4 credits per dollar at the bottom, 23.3 at the top. A hundred times the credits buys about 14 percent better unit value.

Inside that, the 1,500, 2,000 and 3,000 credit rungs give 20.3, 20.2 and 20.1 credits per dollar, which is worse than Creator's 20.7. If one Creator plan is not enough, two Creator accounts can beat the next Pro rung, provided the second is a genuinely separate user, since the terms do not let you share a login. What Pro adds over Creator is 4K export and access to all of HeyGen's advanced models, so buy Pro when you need those, not as a bulk discount.

The annual discounts are consistent and modest: 17.2 percent on Creator, about 17 percent across the Pro ladder and 20.1 percent on Business. HeyGen does not run a sitewide percentage banner, and after the banners we have found elsewhere in this category, true on one tier and quoted as if true on all, that is worth noting in its favour.

On paid plans the terms are good for advertisers. HeyGen's terms of service, last updated 23 July 2026, say you own all rights in your user output, that HeyGen does not restrict your ability to use it for commercial purposes, and that HeyGen assigns to you all right, title and interest in it. Handing finished files to a client follows from that ownership, even though there is no clause that names sublicensing the way Higgsfield's terms do.

Three limits matter if you work for clients. You may let your employees and contractors use the account but may not authorize third parties, so a client cannot log in and self-serve on your plan. White-labeling any portion of the service is prohibited. And output from the free plan may not be sold, sublicensed, monetized or used in connection with advertising or client work, so testing ad concepts on Free and running them is a breach.

Two more are about the ads themselves. The terms require you to disclose that output was created with AI to the extent the law requires it, and forbid representing it as entirely human generated. Any digital twin of a real person needs that person's explicit consent, recorded by them on video, and they can ask for their likeness to be removed at any time. Finally, HeyGen takes a broad licence to your content, including to train and improve its models. If a client's brand guidelines forbid that, settle it before you upload their assets.

The terms say payments are non-refundable except where required by law, and that cancelling mid-period does not refund charges already paid. The refund page in the help centre is softer: purchases made through HeyGen may be refunded within 15 days, case by case, and refunds may be refused if a significant amount of credits has already been used. Treat the terms as the rule and the help centre as a courtesy.

Credits are the part to watch. On paid plans they roll over, which is a real advantage: monthly subscribers carry unused credits one further month, annual subscribers accumulate them until renewal. But any remaining credits expire when you cancel, annual plans are not prorated on cancellation, and HeyGen's help centre states that pausing your plan expires your credit balance entirely. Pause to save money in a quiet month and you lose the rollover you were saving.

There is no cancellation deadline in the terms, which is better than vendors that want 72 hours' notice, and you cancel from the account. Several one-star reviewers describe having to get past a support chatbot to do it, so give yourself a day.

HeyGen holds 3.9 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 3,484 reviews as of 17 September 2026: 66 percent five-star, 9 percent four, 4 percent three, 4 percent two and 17 percent one-star. That is a barbell, not a bell curve, and it is the same shape we found on Higgsfield, Zeely and Arcads.

The five-star reviews are short and about the product: easy to use, realistic avatars, good lip sync, hours saved. Trustpilot labels the twenty most recent five-star reviews as collected through HeyGen's own invitation flow, which is normal practice and worth knowing when you weigh them. HeyGen has replied to 45 percent of its negative reviews.

The one-star reviews are about commerce, not craft. The recurring themes are credit burn and rate increases, surprise daily limits, features behind a higher tier, being billed after cancelling, refund disputes and chatbot-only support. One reviewer asks why the Avatar V rate rose from 20 to 48 credits a minute; another says they were charged more credits than the published rate. Read them as a warning about the meter rather than the output, and budget on the current burn table.

If you need a talking presenter reading a script you already have, buy HeyGen. At 62 to 75 cents a 30-second ad on Creator it is cheaper per finished spokesperson video than anything we sell, and cheaper than every rival we have measured.

If you need translation, buy HeyGen. 175 languages and dialects with lip sync on every paid plan is a localisation workflow we do not offer at all.

If you need a digital twin of a real person, your founder or a paid spokesperson, buy HeyGen. A consistent, consented likeness across hundreds of videos is its core strength.

If you need long-form, landscape, training or LMS video, buy HeyGen. Thirty-minute and sixty-minute videos, SCORM export and 4K are built for that job, and ours is 9:16 ad creative only.

Where the comparison turns is ad testing. Paid social is a search for a winning angle, and the script is the hard part. HeyGen renders the words you give it very well; it does not decide them. That is the case for AdsGen, and plenty of teams sensibly run both: HeyGen for the founder video, us for the batch of hooks.

You paste a product URL. We read the page for the product, its claims and its images, write UGC-style scripts with different hooks and angles, and return finished vertical video ads with AI presenters and burned-in captions, ready to upload to TikTok, Meta or Shorts. There is no script to write and no burn table to budget against.

The limits are worth stating before you sign up. Output is 9:16 vertical with captions burned in, so it suits paid social and does not suit a landscape explainer or a training course. It works from a product URL, so a thin or image-only product page gives the model less to work with. The presenters are generated, so they are not real customers and must never be presented as testimonials from named people. We do not clone your founder, and we do not translate into 175 languages, which are exactly the things people buy HeyGen for.

You can see the output on your own product before paying. The demo above runs the real engine on a URL you paste.