Arcads vs HeyGen: The Feature Gap Closed, the Pricing Gap Did Not

Same ad, two very different front doors

A marketer with one skincare bottle and a budget review on Friday opens two tabs. She wants the same thing from both: a person on camera holding the bottle, speaking her script, vertical, ready to drop into an ad account. She opens HeyGen's pricing page and reads the whole ladder without signing in. Free at $0 a month, Creator at $29, Pro at $49, Business at $149 plus $20 a seat, Enterprise on request. Then she opens the Arcads equivalent and gets a 404.

Both tools will make her ad. That is the part that changed. These two used to be filed in different drawers, HeyGen as the corporate avatar studio and Arcads as the ad-creative shop, and the comparison wrote itself off the feature list. It does not any more. HeyGen runs a UGC video generator headlined as an app for ads at scale, staffed with more than 1,100 AI UGC presenters it describes as everyday creators rather than corporate spokespeople. Arcads runs a library of more than 1,000 AI actors for the same job. Both put your product into the scene. Both translate and caption. If you are new to the format itself, what a UGC creator actually is is the primer worth reading first.

So the interesting question stopped being what each one can do. It became what each one will tell you before you commit.

The short version

If you only read one section, this is the decision.

• The features are a tie. Presenter libraries of roughly the same size, product-in-scene on both sides, captions and translation on both sides, and both aimed squarely at paid social.
• The disclosure is not a tie. HeyGen prints its plans, its limits and its API rates on public pages. Arcads prints none of it publicly: pricing is behind an account, and the only cost surface it publishes openly is a credit meter with no currency attached to it.
• Pick on how you like to evaluate. HeyGen if you want to test at zero cost and put a number in a budget before anyone signs anything. Arcads if you are comfortable opening an account first and judging the product from inside it.

One note on sourcing before the detail, because it matters for how much weight to put on each number. Every HeyGen figure below sits on a page you can open right now. Every Arcads dollar figure below comes from the onboarding paywall, captured on 7 August 2026 by creating an account, which is not a page you can open and not something a link can prove. Where a number is gated, this post says so in the sentence that uses it.

Where the two now agree

The convergence is real and it is worth being precise about, because a comparison that invents a feature gap ages badly within a quarter. On the three things an ad buyer actually cares about, these products have landed in the same place.

Two presenter libraries of roughly the same size

Arcads leads with a library of 1,000+ Captivating AI Actors and the option to create your own AI avatar on top of it. HeyGen's UGC page offers 1,100+ AI UGC Video presenters, and it is explicit that they are cast to look like everyday creators rather than corporate spokespeople, which is the exact positioning Arcads built its brand on. Library size is therefore a non-differentiator, and any comparison that scores it as one is measuring rounding error. What still varies is casting depth on the entry plan, which is a packaging question rather than a capability one, and it comes up again below.

Both put your product into the scene

Arcads' product video page sells making an actor hold your product, show your app or wear your clothes. HeyGen ships a product placement tool where you upload a packshot, choose a scene, and the platform drops the item in with matched lighting, scale and motion. The two get there differently, one by building the product into a custom actor's hands and one by compositing a packshot into a chosen setting, so the fidelity you get will depend on your source images either way. Both are shipping features on both sides, which means the useful test is no longer whether a tool can show your product but how well it renders yours specifically. Run the same three product photos through each and judge the output, not the feature list.

Both finish the ad instead of handing you a clip

This is the quieter convergence. Captions, background removal, music, B-roll and translation used to be the reason to keep a second tool open. Both now cover that ground: Arcads markets translation in more than 30 languages, and HeyGen's Creator tier lists 175 or more languages and dialects along with watermark removal. Arcads' captions and background removal are live features that unlock on a specific plan rather than optional add-ons. The practical effect is that the file you download is the file you upload, on both sides, which used to be a genuine differentiator and is now table stakes.

What you can find out before you pay

Here is where the two part company, and it is not a small gap. It changes who can evaluate the tool, how long that takes, and whether a price ever reaches the person who approves the spend.

HeyGen puts the whole ladder on one public page

HeyGen's pricing page is the ladder, in the open, with no account.

• Free, $0 a month. 3 videos per month, videos up to 1 minute.
• Creator, $29 a month. 600 credits, 1080p export, watermark removal, 175 or more languages and dialects.
• Pro, $49 a month. 1,000 credits, 4K export.
• Business, $149 a month. 1,500 credits, additional seats at $20 each.
• Enterprise, contact sales. Normal at that end of any ladder.

There is also a separate public API page, linked from pricing, with a pay-as-you-go tier that starts at $5. You can build a rough annual number for a five-person team from that page alone, in about a minute, before anyone has typed an email address. That is not a small courtesy. It is the difference between a tool that can be shortlisted by whoever holds the budget and one that can only be shortlisted by whoever is willing to sign up.

Arcads keeps the number behind the signup

Arcads publishes no pricing page. Three checks, all of which you can repeat:

• The /pricing URL returns a 404, and so do /plans and /prices.
• No pricing, plan or billing entry appears anywhere in its 280-entry sitemap, nav or footer.
• The Wayback Machine holds no capture of such a page at any point in its history.

So this is not a page that broke, it is a page that never existed. The prices are real and they are not hidden from customers, they are simply downstream of a signup: they appear on the onboarding paywall once you create an account and confirm an email code. Captured there on 7 August 2026, Starter listed at $110 a month, Creator at $220 and Pro at $550, with all three struck through at 30 percent off under a countdown, and no free tier of any kind. Those figures come from a gated capture on a single day, they may vary by country, and the promo was time-boxed, so the list price is the durable number and the discount is a snapshot.

What Arcads does publish is the meter, not the money

It would be unfair to file Arcads as simply opaque, because on one axis it is more transparent than most of its category. Its public help centre documents the credit meter in detail, and that splits the cost question in an unusual way.

• Published, no account needed: a talking actor costs 800 credits per minute, per actor, and each video model carries its own credit range.
• Not published anywhere: what a credit costs in money.

So you can price a minute of talking-actor video precisely, in credits, and still have no idea what it costs. That tells you something about who the site is written for. It answers the question a customer asks in week two, not the one a prospect asks in minute one.

Dimension	Arcads	HeyGen
Where the price lives	Behind account signup	Public pricing page
Lowest plan	Starter, no $0 tier	Free, $0 a month
Entry price	$110 list, $77 on promo	$29 Creator
Presenter library	1,000+ marketed, 300 on entry	1,100+ UGC presenters
Product in scene	Actor holds your product	Packshot into a scene
Programmatic access	API on the top plan	Pay as you go from $5
Connector for AI assistants	On every plan	Inside the API tier

Arcads' column, apart from the library and product rows, is read off that gated paywall capture. HeyGen's column is read off pages you can open.

One caution before anyone divides one entry price by the other. The two do not buy the same basket. Each vendor runs its own credit currency spent across a different mix of models and tools, and Arcads' plans bundle a monthly image allowance on top of the video one, so a straight $110 against $29 is a comparison of front doors, not of value. Front doors are what this post is about.

What each plan actually unlocks

Packaging is where the two philosophies show up most clearly, and it is more decision-relevant than any feature checklist. The same capability can be a $29 line item at one vendor and a $550 line item at the other.

HeyGen: capability climbs with the tier

HeyGen's ladder does what most self-serve software does. The $0 tier is a genuine sample with hard caps, 3 videos a month and a one-minute ceiling, enough to judge whether the presenters look right for your brand. Creator at $29 removes the watermark, raises the length ceiling and opens the wider language set. Pro at $49 adds 4K and more credits. Business at $149 adds seats, and seats are priced openly at $20 each, which is the detail agencies actually need to model. Each step buys you a specific, named thing, and you can see all of them before you decide.

Arcads: the library itself is one of the gates

The paywall capture shows something the marketing site does not. Arcads' actor library is itself plan-gated. That matters most to the buyer this category is really sold to, the direct-to-consumer brand running its own ads, because casting range is what lets one product carry many angles.

• Starter: 300 actors.
• Creator: 1,000 actors, plus workflow automation, captions and background removal.
• Pro: 1,500 actors, plus API access, custom actors and credit rollover.

So the flat "1,000+ AI Actors" that headlines the public site describes Creator and above, and an entry-plan customer sees roughly a third of it. That is not a bait and switch, it is ordinary tiering, and every vendor does some version of it. What is different here is that it is invisible from the outside. An open pricing page surfaces this kind of detail at evaluation time; a gated one surfaces it at renewal time, which is a worse moment to find out.

Where programmatic access sits

The most interesting packaging call on either side is Arcads' split between two kinds of automation.

• The MCP connector, which wires the tool into an AI assistant, ships on every plan including Starter.
• The API, which wires the tool into your own stack, is reserved for Pro, listed at $550 a month.

Those two are the same instinct pointed at different buyers: the assistant connector is treated as an acquisition feature and the API is treated as an enterprise upsell. HeyGen makes the opposite call and prices its API on a public pay-as-you-go page from $5, with the assistant connector included there. If a developer on your team is going to touch this, that gap is the largest single line in the comparison.

A worked example: how far the entry plan goes

Take the concrete version, because the abstractions hide the shape. You are testing one product and you want to know how much presenter video a month of the cheapest plan buys, before you commit to anything.

On HeyGen, the answer costs nothing to establish. The Free tier gives you 3 videos a month at up to a minute each, so you can generate three real ads, watch them back, and decide whether the presenters read as human enough for your category. If they do, $29 removes the watermark and lifts the ceiling. If they do not, you have spent nothing and learned the thing that mattered.

On Arcads, the same answer requires an account and a small piece of arithmetic that joins a public number to a gated one.

1. The public help centre gives the meter: a talking actor costs 800 credits per minute, per actor.
2. The gated paywall gives the allowance: Starter carries 8,000 credits a month.
3. Divide, and Starter buys ten minutes of talking-actor video a month.
4. Check it against the paywall's own wording for that tier, up to 600 seconds of avatar talking, and the two agree exactly.

Ten minutes is roughly twenty vertical ads at thirty seconds each, and Starter's $110 list price is what covers it, plus whatever the plan's separate video-clip and image allowances add on top. The two numbers landing on the same figure from opposite directions is a good sign for anyone doing this arithmetic themselves: the public meter and the gated allowance are describing the same thing, so you can trust the division.

Two things follow. First, the maths is doable and Arcads deserves credit for publishing half of it openly. Second, you cannot do it until after you have signed up, which means the shortlist decision, the one made in a browser with eleven tabs open, gets made without it. If you are sizing a testing budget rather than a single ad, how many ad creatives you actually need is the number that should drive this, and what UGC creators charge is the human baseline both tools are priced against.

Which one fits the ad you are making

There is no winner here, and a post that declared one would be selling something. There is a fit test, and it splits cleanly on how your team buys rather than on what the tools produce.

Choose HeyGen when:

• You need to put a real number in a budget before anyone signs up for anything.
• You want to see actual output quality at zero cost before entering payment details.
• Seats matter, and you want the per-seat price posted rather than negotiated.
• A developer will call this from your own stack and you would rather pay per use than per tier.
• Your video needs run wider than ads, into translation, training or product explainers.

Choose Arcads when:

• You are comfortable creating an account as step one of the evaluation.
• Ad creative is the entire job and you want a tool with no other audience to serve.
• You want casting depth and custom avatars as the centre of the workflow rather than a feature.
• You intend to drive it from an AI assistant, which is available on the entry plan.
• Your volume sits high enough that the top tier, with its API and rollover, is the plan you were going to buy anyway.

For the wider field around each of them, the best HeyGen alternatives and best Arcads alternatives guides map it, and Arcads versus Creatify covers a different pair with a very similar transparency split. For the format itself, UGC-style ads explains why the handheld look outperforms the polished one on paid social.

Disclosure: we make one of these tools

This post is published by Novoads, which sells AI UGC video ads and therefore competes with both companies above. The overlap is direct rather than adjacent: talking actor video, background removal and captions all ship in Novoads too. That is a conflict of interest, so it belongs on the page rather than in a footnote. We have kept ourselves out of the comparison itself on purpose: there is no third column, no scorecard we happen to win, and nothing above changes if you never look at us. For the record and in the same spirit as the rest of the post, our own ladder is public: $1 for three days of access, then $49 a month for the Inicial plan, with higher tiers above it. If you want the first-party version of this argument, we wrote Novoads versus HeyGen separately and it is exactly as partial as it sounds.

The demo is a tie. The disclosure is not.

There was a version of this comparison you could settle on a feature list, and the list would have been short and decisive. It is not the version in front of you. The presenter libraries are the same size, the product goes into the scene either way, and the captions burn in on both sides. When the output converges, the remaining variable is not what the software does. It is how much of the deal each vendor is willing to show you before you are inside it. HeyGen has decided that number belongs on a public page; Arcads has decided it belongs one signup away, while publishing the credit meter that prices it. Neither is wrong, and both are a real answer to the question of who the product is for. Just make sure you notice which one you are choosing, because you are choosing it either way.