Arcads vs HeyGen: Which Should You Pick?

The surface question is which AI actor looks less synthetic. The question that decides the money is different. Arcads sells minutes of a casting library under a license you cannot hand to anyone else, and will not show you a price until you have created an account. HeyGen publishes a per-feature credit rate card and a free tier, then deletes your unspent balance the moment you cancel — or merely pause. One is opaque going in. The other is punitive going out.

The pricing gap is not close

Arcads publishes no rate card. On 2026-09-03, arcads.ai/pricing returned HTTP 404 and the homepage contained no price string at all; the $110 Starter and $220 Creator figures everyone repeats come from third-party trackers, not from Arcads. What Arcads does publish is the credit table, and the arithmetic lives there. Starter includes 8,000 monthly credits. Talking Actor models cost 800 credits per minute per actor, and "Length is always rounded up."

So: $110 across 8,000 credits is $0.01375 a credit, and a 20-second talking-actor clip bills as a full minute — 800 credits, $11.00. Add captions at 80 credits and one generation is 880 credits, or $12.10, which is nine attempts a month on Starter. Keep half to a quarter of them (an assumption, not a measurement) and a shipped ad costs $24 to $49. Not the $11 the per-video headline implies.

HeyGen's numbers sit on a public page. Creator is $29/mo, or $24 billed annually, for 600 credits — $0.048 a credit, roughly three and a half times Arcads' price per credit. Credits per video flip the result completely. Avatar IV Photo Look is 16 credits a minute, so a 30-second render is 8 credits, about $0.39. At two renders per keeper, a shipped clip is $0.78, and 600 credits carry 37 of them. Even on Avatar V at 48 credits a minute, a shipped 30-second clip runs about $2.32.

Two caveats before anyone quotes those figures. The Arcads model prices captions and the HeyGen model does not — HeyGen's published table covers avatars, translation, Video Agent, and model training, with no captioning line. And our HeyGen model prorates a 30-second render to half a minute — our assumption, since the credit article publishes a per-minute rate and no rounding rule — while Arcads states in writing that "Length is always rounded up." If HeyGen rounds too, double its per-clip number; it is still an order of magnitude below Arcads.

A casting library that punishes the format it was built for

Arcads' pitch is depth of cast: 1,000+ AI actors, emotion control, 30+ languages, generation across Seedance, Kling, and Sora 2 Pro. The buyer for that is a performance team firing hook variants at Meta and TikTok. Round-up billing works directly against that buyer. A 15-second hook and a 60-second explainer both cost 800 credits, so the shorter your creative, the worse the trade — and hooks are short by definition.

Push the volume case further and it breaks outright. Thirty single-actor hook variants with captions is 26,400 credits. Starter holds 8,000 and Creator 16,000, neither tier rolls credits over, and there is no top-up on a standard offer: you wait for renewal or negotiate a custom one. The tool positioned for high-volume variant testing cannot run high-volume variant testing on either self-serve plan.

HeyGen is a general avatar engine that will make an ad if you ask it to. Its strength is realism — G2 lists it "#1 most realistic avatars" at 4.8/5, a count our record put at 1,924 on 2026-09-02 and has not re-verified since, and sentiment from that panel rather than a measurement — plus 175+ language lip-synced translation at 4 to 10 credits a minute. Its weakness for this job is aesthetic, and it is the one dimension on which our own comparison scores Arcads the winner: HeyGen's avatars skew polished and presenter-style, while the Arcads library is built specifically for the casual UGC-ad look.

The public review signal splits the same way. Arcads holds 2.7/5 across 170 Trustpilot reviews with 46% at one star and 44% at five, no G2 listing, and a ProductHunt score of 4.7 from three reviews — too few to weigh. HeyGen holds 3.7/5 across 3,088 Trustpilot reviews with 18% at one star, against 4.7/5 from 319 Capterra reviews. On both, the Trustpilot tail runs mostly to money rather than craft: three of the four named one-star patterns in our Arcads review are commercial rather than creative — an unrecognized card descriptor, renewals after cancellation, unanswered support — and all five clustered in our HeyGen review are credits, billing, refunds, or support.

What the Arcads and HeyGen contracts each commit you to

When something goes wrong	Arcads	HeyGen
Unused credits on exit	"not refunded or carried forward"; Starter and Creator credits never roll over	Roll over one cycle while you pay; expire on cancellation — and on pause
Refund window	30 days, firm; full refund only if you used zero credits; poor output quality never qualifies	15 days direct and Google Play, 14 via Apple; case by case; may be denied once significant credits are used
What you get	"non-exclusive, personal and non-transferable license on the Video" (Terms §13.3.1)	Paid plans: "you own all rights in your User Input or User Output," commercial use included. Free plan: evaluation only
If the depicted actor withdraws	Pull the videos or owe €100 per day of delay (Terms §13.3.2)	You are responsible for honoring the removal request; no penalty stated
Where a dispute goes	Exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Paris (Terms §27); any claim by registered letter within one month (Terms §18)	Binding individual arbitration, class-action waiver, 30-day opt-out

Two rows carry most of the decision. Non-transferable means the Arcads license lives with the account holder, so an agency generating on its own account cannot cleanly assign the creative to the client whose product is in the ad. If your statement of work promises the client owns delivered work, read §13.3.1 before you sign it. Worth flagging: our own structured record for Arcads still says its usage rights are "not publicly documented," while the Terms document them plainly. The clause is the current fact; the summary is the thing that is behind.

The HeyGen row that catches people is the free plan. Every listicle tells you to start there, and the tier is genuinely usable — three one-minute videos a month, no card. But the Terms license free output "solely for personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes," so running a free-plan clip as a live ad is a breach. Free buys you a quality check, not inventory. And credits expire on a pause as well as a cancellation, which turns seasonal buying into a year-round subscription paid to keep a balance alive.

Both take a training license on what you feed them: Arcads over your scripts (§13.4), HeyGen's "royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide and irrevocable" over Your Content. Neither is negotiable at self-serve prices.

Who should buy HeyGen, and who should buy Arcads

Buy HeyGen if you will reliably spend 600 credits a month, want commercial ownership with no per-video licensing step, and localization is part of the job. Do not buy HeyGen if your production is lumpy and a forfeited balance would hurt, if you run political or advocacy content — it is non-permissible under the moderation policy — or if you plan to publish free-plan output. Either way, sixteen HeyGen alternatives, priced.

Buy Arcads only if your ads genuinely run close to a full minute, you need actor variety no other library matches, and you have seen output samples for your product category before paying. Do not buy Arcads if you are an agency delivering owned creative, if your library is all sub-30-second hooks, if you need a price before a card, or if you cannot archive a cancellation email — the refund policy downgrades you to a single month's charge without one.

Neither buys a real person holding your product. If the creative depends on that, the right aisle is a human marketplace like Billo or Insense, not a better prompt.