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 publishes no pricing page: the dollars sit on an in-app paywall after signup, and the 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 decides how much weight to put on each number. Every figure below was re-fetched on 7 September 2026 from a page you can open without an account, with one exception that carries its surface and its date every time it appears: Arcads' dollar prices, which sit on an in-app paywall after signup and come from a capture of it made on 7 August 2026. Its customers see those prices; nobody outside can link to them or recheck them, so they are reported as a dated snapshot rather than as today's price. The barrier is still the fact this post is about.

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' own credit table prices captions, background removal, translation and video extension as tools inside the product 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, from $49 a month. 1,000 credits, 4K export, with higher-credit tiers above it.
• 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. Four checks, each of which you can repeat in about a minute:

• The /pricing URL returns a 404, and so do /plans and /prices.
• The word pricing does not appear in the homepage HTML at all. The top navigation reads Features, Industries, Login or Sign up.
• No pricing, plan or billing entry appears anywhere in its 280-entry sitemap.
• The Wayback Machine holds no capture of such a page at any point in its history, so there is nothing to compare against either.

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, and Arcads says as much in its own documentation: the setup guide for its MCP server tells you to check your plan, upgrade or top up credits on the billing screen inside the app. Its refund policy, read on 18 September 2026, sets the other half of the entry terms: a 3-day trial that charges the saved card for the Starter plan unless you cancel from Billing settings before the 72 hours are up.

That is why this post dates every Arcads dollar figure to the surface it came from. On a capture of that in-app paywall made on 7 August 2026, Starter read $110 a month, Creator $220 and Pro $550, each struck through and discounted 30% that day under a countdown timer. A number that lives behind an account cannot be linked or rechecked by a reader, so treat it as one day in one country rather than as the price your own paywall will show you.

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, each video model carries its own credit range, and tools are priced individually per use.
• Published, no account needed: the plan allowances. Starter carries 8,000 monthly credits and Creator 16,000, both resetting every cycle with nothing rolling over.
• Published, no account needed: that higher volumes get a lower cost per credit.
• Not on any page you can open: what a credit costs in money. The paywall carries it, one signup away, and the dated capture above is the only version of it this post can show you.

So you can price a month of talking-actor video precisely, in credits, and learn what it costs in dollars only once you are inside. Arcads will even tell you that buying in volume lowers the cost per credit without saying anywhere public what one credit costs to begin with. That is a coherent choice rather than an oversight: 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 on a public page	None published	Free, $0 a month
Entry tier allowance	8,000 credits a month	3 videos a month
Presenter library	1,000+ marketed	1,100+ UGC presenters
Product in scene	Actor holds your product	Packshot into a scene
Programmatic access	API documented, account required	Pay as you go from $5
Connector for AI assistants	MCP documented, plan required	Inside the API tier

Both columns are read off pages you can open. Arcads' help centre publishes enough to describe the shape of its ladder in credits, which is more than most of the category manages. What it does not publish on a page you can open is the money.

One caution before anyone lines an allowance up against a price. The two do not buy the same basket. HeyGen runs a single credit currency spent across video and asset creation. Arcads prices each model, preset and tool separately, and gives image generation a daily free allowance that does not spend paid credits at all. A credit is not a unit you can carry from one vendor to the other, so treat the row above as a description of two front doors rather than a value comparison. 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. One vendor tells you what each rung costs before you climb it. The other tells you what each rung holds.

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 from $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 ladder is public in credits, not in money

Arcads' help centre describes the shape of its ladder without describing the price of it, and the shape is more decision-relevant than it sounds. That matters most to the buyer this category is really sold to, the direct-to-consumer brand running its own ads, because how a plan behaves at the limit decides how a test month actually goes.

• Starter: 8,000 credits a month. Credits reset each cycle, nothing rolls over, and the account pauses when the allowance runs out.
• Creator: 16,000 credits a month, on the same reset-and-pause terms.
• Pro, Scale and Business: named as higher tiers, arranged with the Arcads team rather than picked off a page. Unused credits roll into the next cycle and usage past the limit is billed rather than blocked.

Two things follow that a feature checklist would miss. The first is that the entry plan is a hard stop rather than a slow-down: run out on Starter in week three and the work waits for the renewal date. The second is that the interesting break in the ladder is not a feature, it is rollover, which is the difference between a plan that punishes an uneven month and one that absorbs it. Both facts are public. Neither carries a price on a page you can open, which is why the dollars in this post come with the date of the paywall they were captured from.

Where programmatic access sits

Both vendors have shipped both doors, and both document them in public. The difference is again what you can cost before you commit.

• Arcads publishes an API guide (create an account, then generate credentials at Settings, Public API) and an MCP guide (point an assistant client at its server address). As of 7 September 2026 those articles state one prerequisite for the assistant door in plain words, an active subscription with remaining credits, because generation spends the plan's credits.
• HeyGen puts programmatic access on a public page and prices it pay as you go from $5, with MCP server access listed inside that same tier.

So a developer can price a HeyGen integration in a browser tab and can only price an Arcads one after subscribing. That is the largest single line in the comparison for any team whose stack, rather than whose marketer, is going to drive the tool. It is also the clearest case of the pattern the whole post is about: the capability is on both sides, the disclosure is not.

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 volume answer is readable too, and it takes two numbers from the same help centre.

1. The meter: a talking actor costs 800 credits per minute, per actor.
2. The allowance: the Starter plan carries 8,000 monthly credits.
3. Divide, and Starter buys ten minutes of talking-actor video a month.
4. Convert to ads: ten minutes is roughly twenty vertical spots at thirty seconds each, one actor per spot. Add a second actor to a scene and the meter charges for both, so the same month buys ten.

What that month costs in dollars is not on any page you can open. It is on the paywall a signup away, dated above rather than quoted as current. Arcads has published the numerator and the denominator of a volume calculation in the open and kept the currency inside the account, which is a genuinely unusual place to draw the line. It is enough to plan a testing cadence with. It is not enough to put in a budget with a link beside it, and the shortlist decision, the one made in a browser with eleven tabs open, is a budget decision. 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, and an active subscription as the documented prerequisite is fine by you.
• Your volume sits high enough that a higher tier, where unused credits roll over instead of expiring, 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: $49 a month for the entry 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.