HeyGen Review (2026): Features, Pricing, Free-Plan Limits & Verdict

Four figures on this page were simply wrong when we published it in June 2026, and the honest move is to list them rather than quietly swap them out. We printed a Team plan at roughly $69 a seat a month, never mentioned Pro or Business at all, said HeyGen credits expire monthly with no rollover, and pointed readers to a real-time Interactive Avatar API as though it shipped inside the subscription. Every one of those is wrong today, and the Team-plan figure was already wrong on the day we published.

The wider record is no better, which is the more useful point for you. Of the HeyGen reviews currently ranking, the two that already name Pro and Business both print Pro at $99 a month, which was true in March 2026 and has not been true since. One high-authority tech publication still lists a Team plan at $30 a seat. Another gives no dollar figures at all. Several do describe what Business adds, SCORM export included, and one is specific about how many credits individual features consume. What none of them does is turn any of it into money: not one works out what a credit costs you in dollars, or what a finished minute does, which is the arithmetic that actually decides which tier you need.

One disambiguation before the numbers. HeyGen in this review is the AI video platform at heygen.com, the company described on Wikipedia as a generative AI company creating photo-realistic avatars from user-submitted photos and video. It is not related to any similarly-spelled surname or place name.

What HeyGen does (and who it's for)

HeyGen is AI avatar video software. You write or paste a script into its AI studio editor, pick a presenter from the stock library or a custom digital twin built from your own footage, choose a voice from 1,000+ options across 175+ languages and dialects, and HeyGen renders a finished video of that avatar speaking your words with synchronised lip movement. No camera, studio or presenter is involved. PowerPoint and PDF import, a screen recorder, 75+ templates and audio input sit around that core on every plan including the free one.

Three named workflows are worth telling apart, because competing reviews blur them and the billing does not. Studio avatar video is the main product, rendered from a script in the editor. Video Agent builds a whole video from a single prompt, choosing scenes for you. Photo Avatars, sometimes called avatar looks, animate a still image and are a cheaper, lighter output than a full video digital twin: Free gets up to 3, every paid plan gets unlimited. A custom digital twin, the thing most people mean by cloning themselves, is a separate allowance entirely, and there is exactly 1 on Free.

The clean fit is creators and marketers shipping talking-avatar or script-to-video content at volume: faceless YouTube channels, course modules, product explainers, onboarding clips, localised campaigns and personalised sales video. Since January 2026 there is a second clean fit that this page previously denied existed, which is workplace learning and development, because SCORM export and LMS integrations now ship on a self-serve tier. If you need cinematic b-roll or scene-based storytelling rather than a presenter, this is the wrong category. For where HeyGen sits against the rest of it, see how the avatar tools in this category rank against each other.

One vendor claim is worth holding up to the light, because it frames how much the public record can tell you. HeyGen states it serves 100,000+ businesses and that it was G2's fastest-growing product of 2025, both vendor claims rather than anything we verified. Set that first number against the 1,966 G2 reviews this page cites further down: fewer than 2% of the claimed customer base has ever left a review anywhere we can read. Every rating in this review, ours included, is therefore built on a thin slice of a large user base, which is a reason to weight the specific, dated reports below more heavily than any aggregate score.

How we reviewed this

This HeyGen review is based on the product's documented features, its pricing read directly from heygen.com/pricing on August 3, 2026, its separate API and LiveAvatar pricing pages read on the same day, archived copies of the pricing page from December 2025 through June 2026, and 17 dated, attributed reports from real users across public Reddit threads: 14 quoted in the user-evidence section below, two in the integrations section, and one more in the change log. Nobody on this team opened an account, generated an avatar clip, or grabbed a screenshot; the archive snapshots and the Reddit links carry the evidence instead. We re-check the pricing on this page periodically and restate the date it was last verified.

Three things about method are worth flagging before the figures, because each one changes how much a given number should be trusted.

1. We parsed the pricing page's raw markup rather than trusting a single automated summary of it. Two earlier automated reads of the same page disagreed with each other about voice cloning, and one of them turned out to be shifted by a column. The raw parse settles it, and it is also what surfaced the free-tier export-resolution problem described below.
2. G2 and Trustpilot both refuse scripted retrieval, so an automated fetch of either returns nothing usable. The pages themselves open normally in a browser, which is how we read those two profiles, taking the score and the review count off the page instead of repeating another publication's summary. The G2 figure quoted further down was read that way on September 6, 2026, and the Trustpilot figure on September 9, 2026.
3. Every quoted Reddit report below falls between May 2024 and May 2025, the newest window the public archive returns for this product. There is nothing more current to cite, so we are dating the sample honestly rather than dressing it up as this month's sentiment.

We hold no commercial relationship that depends on the score, and we sell no competing avatar or video product.

The free plan: limits and credit drain

HeyGen's free plan is permanent rather than a countdown, which already puts it ahead of rivals offering only a trial window. It is also tighter than it was eight months ago. Free gives you 3 videos a month, a 1-minute cap on each, 500+ stock digital twins, 1 custom digital twin, up to 3 photo avatars, 1 voice clone, 30+ languages and a HeyGen watermark on every export. HeyGen describes the premium engines on Free as limited trial access to Avatar IV, Video Agent and lip-sync translation.

Free does not run on credits at all. HeyGen's monthly credit allocation starts on the paid plans, so the wall you hit is the video count, and every render spends one of the three whether you keep it or not. Generate a clip, dislike the pacing, tweak the script and re-render, and two of your three are gone on the same thirty seconds of footage.

There is a second wall on Free that has nothing to do with limits, and it catches freelancers in particular. HeyGen's terms of service license free-plan output for personal, non-commercial, internal-evaluation use only, and exclude selling it, monetising it, or using it for client work or advertising. Section 3 grants full commercial rights to paid subscribers; section 4 withholds them from the free tier. The videos themselves are identical apart from the watermark, so nothing in the product stops you delivering a free-plan render to a client, but the licence does. If the output will earn money, directly or through a client invoice or an ad-supported channel, Creator at $29 a month is the floor rather than a convenience. Licensing language moves more quietly than pricing does, so re-read the current terms before you build a workflow on this.

One figure we cannot state cleanly, and would rather flag than guess. HeyGen's own plan comparison leaves the export-resolution cell for Free visually blank, while the underlying page data still carries 720P for that cell, and 1080p export is listed as something Creator adds on top. Archived copies of the pricing page from December 2025 and March 2026 both printed "720p video export" plainly on the Free card. So the honest reading is that free exports are not 1080p, most likely 720p, and that HeyGen has stopped saying so out loud. If watermark-free 1080p matters to your evaluation, treat Creator as the floor rather than assuming Free will show you what you are buying.

The Interactive Avatar API

The real-time conversational avatar is the feature most HeyGen reviews skip, and the story has changed enough since June that our own previous version is now misleading. Standard HeyGen renders a finished video file. The real-time product renders a live streaming presenter that listens and answers, the kind of thing you embed in a support widget, a kiosk or a language-practice app. That product is no longer sold as part of a HeyGen subscription.

How the real-time avatar is actually billed

Two separate things have moved out of the plan ladder, and buyers conflate them constantly.

The video API is a standalone pay-as-you-go product on its own pricing page, starting from $5 with no monthly commitment, covering programmatic video generation on the Avatar III and IV engines, text to speech, video translation, photo avatars and template rendering. HeyGen's own API pricing FAQ is unusually direct about the billing split: usage through its MCP integration comes out of your web plan's premium credit balance, while API-key usage comes out of a separate API dashboard balance, and the two pools are independent. An API enterprise tier adds discounted rates, digital-twin creation and dedicated developer support.

The real-time avatar has gone further and become its own brand. HeyGen's footer now links LiveAvatar as a separate product on its own domain, with its own ladder: free at 10 credits a month capped to 2-minute sessions and a single concurrent stream with a watermark, $19 for 150 credits, $99 for 1,000 credits with the watermark removed, $475 for 5,000 credits with 60-minute sessions and 40 concurrent streams, then custom. LiveAvatar prices in streaming time, not renders: one credit buys 30 seconds of streaming in its full-stack mode or a full minute in the lighter streaming-only mode, and LiveAvatar credits are explicitly independent of HeyGen API credits.

The practical translation, if you are budgeting: upgrading your HeyGen web plan does not unlock a real-time avatar, and it never unlocks an API key either. Those are two more purchases with two more balances. At $99 a month for roughly 500 to 1,000 streaming minutes, an always-on interactive avatar costs materially more than producing the same number of rendered clips, and that was true before the products were split apart. D-ID, the other real-time-capable tool in this category, keeps its agent API inside its normal paid tiers, which is a genuine structural advantage for a developer who wants one invoice.

Voice cloning and lip-sync

Voice cloning is more generous than any competing review reports, and this is the field two automated reads of the pricing page got wrong in opposite directions. HeyGen's plan comparison gives Free exactly 1 voice clone, and Creator, Pro, Business and Enterprise unlimited voice clones. Cloning is not gated to a higher tier, not an enterprise negotiation, and not a paid add-on. A cloned voice stays in your account for future renders. Quality holds on conversational, well-punctuated scripts and strains on acronyms, unusual proper nouns and digits, where spelling them phonetically is the standard fix across the whole category.

Lip-sync is where HeyGen still separates from cheaper tools. On stock avatars the mouth shapes track audio closely, and on Avatar IV the realism steps up with more natural micro-expressions and head movement that stays locked at faster delivery. Independent users describe the trajectory as genuinely improving rather than solved, which the user-evidence section below covers in their own words.

Two ceilings the marketing does not surface. Custom digital twins, the personal avatars built from your own footage, run 1 on Free, 1 plus paid add-ons on Creator and Pro, 5 on Business and 10 or more on Enterprise. And Avatar IV carries its own duration cap of 30 minutes per video on every paid tier, including Business and Enterprise, even though those tiers advertise 60 minutes and no maximum respectively. A 60-minute Business video cannot be a single Avatar IV take. For the voice-only side of this work, our AI voice generators guide goes deeper than this page should.

Pricing ladder 2026: Free, Creator, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and the Team-tier removal

HeyGen sells five tiers and one currency. Every figure below was read from heygen.com/pricing on August 3, 2026.

The Team plan is gone: what replaced it, and when

There is no Team tier on heygen.com/pricing today. The word "team" appears only in feature names like team templates and team member MFA. This page said otherwise for two months and we should not have.

The archive dates it precisely. A snapshot of the pricing page from December 1, 2025 shows three consumer cards, Free, Creator and Team, with Team at $39 a seat a month, two seats included, 4K export and workspace collaboration. There is no Business plan on that page and the word SCORM does not appear on it anywhere. By the January 15, 2026 snapshot the Team card has gone, Business is live, and SCORM export is printed in the feature table. So HeyGen retired its seat-based Team plan between December 1, 2025 and January 15, 2026, which corroborates and narrows the January 2026 date circulating in third-party write-ups.

Our own figure has a likely origin worth naming, since we are correcting ourselves anyway. While Team was still on sale, HeyGen's pricing page contradicted itself: the visible card said $39 a seat a month, or $30 billed annually, while the FAQ text lower down the same page quoted $89 a seat, or $69 annually, for the identical plan. A real seat-sharing listing in HeyGen's own community priced a single seat at exactly $30. Our $69 matches the higher, FAQ-quoted number almost exactly. That is consistent with one explanation for where our figure came from, not proof of it, and either way the tier had already been off sale for roughly five months when we published.

If you were already on Team when it disappeared, the question the pricing page does not answer is whether you keep it. HeyGen's own community forum carries live threads asking exactly this, and the pattern subscribers describe there is that a legacy plan survives as long as billing does: you keep the original tier and the original price while payments go through uninterrupted, and a single failed renewal cancels the plan permanently with no route back to terms that are no longer sold. We could not confirm that in any published HeyGen documentation, so treat it as the reported pattern rather than policy, and if you are sitting on a legacy Team or unlimited-Creator plan, the practical move is to get the grandfathering terms confirmed in writing by support and to make sure the card on file cannot lapse. The downgrade risk is asymmetric: nothing is lost by asking, and a retired tier cannot be repurchased.

If you are still budgeting a multi-seat rollout off the old model, the shape has changed rather than the price. Team was a flat per-seat charge with a two-seat minimum. Business is a $149 base plus $20 for each additional seat, and HeyGen's pricing page does not state that extra seats add credits, so seats buy people access to one shared allowance rather than expanding it.

Pro: the new $49/mo middle tier

Pro is the tier most published HeyGen reviews still get wrong, and it is not one price. Every Pro tier carries identical features and only the monthly credit allocation changes, running from 1,000 credits at $49 a month up to 100,000 credits at $4,300 a month, switchable at any time. Over Creator it adds 4K export, faster processing, translation-script editing and access to all advanced models. It does not add seats or raise the 30-minute video ceiling.

Pro also halved recently. The March 2, 2026 snapshot shows Pro at $99 a month, and by early June it was $49. Reviews quoting $99 are one generation stale rather than careless, which is worth knowing if you are cross-checking this page against others.

One inconsistency to watch at checkout. Pro's own credit-tier record puts the entry tier at $41 a month billed yearly, or $488 for the year, while the annual label on the Pro card in the same page data reads $24 a month, which is Creator's annual rate. We could not resolve which figure the checkout charges, so confirm the annual price on the payment screen before committing to a year.

Cost per credit and cost per finished minute, tier by tier

This is the calculation the whole category avoids publishing, and it is the one that decides whether HeyGen is expensive. HeyGen's pricing FAQ gives the exchange rates directly: Avatar IV and Avatar V video cost 20 credits a minute, Avatar III costs 3, Video Agent costs 20, full video translation with lip sync costs 5, and audio dubbing without lip sync costs 2.

Three things fall out of that table, and none of them is visible on the pricing page.

Business costs roughly twice as much per finished minute as Creator or Pro. You move to Business for SCORM, seats, collaboration and the 60-minute ceiling, not for cheaper video. Anyone reading the tier ladder as a volume discount has it backwards.

Pro's ladder is almost flat. Buying a hundred times more credits, from 1,000 to 100,000, cuts the price per credit by about 12%, and between the 1,000 and 3,000-credit tiers it very slightly increases. Pro exists so you can scale capacity without changing plan, not so scale gets cheap.

The engine you choose moves your cost per minute by nearly seven times. On Creator, a minute of Avatar IV costs about 97 cents and a minute of Avatar III costs about 15 cents. Dubbing an existing video without lip sync is cheapest of all at roughly 10 cents a minute. A team that renders everything on the newest engine out of habit is paying a large premium for footage where it may not show.

One more number worth committing to memory: a single 30-minute Avatar IV video costs 600 credits, which is Creator's entire monthly allowance. Creator advertises 30-minute videos and funds exactly one of them.

Credits do now roll over, which is a correction to what this page said in June. HeyGen's pricing FAQ states that monthly subscribers' unused credits roll over for one more month and annual subscribers' credits accumulate until their annual renewal date, and the Creator card carries a credit-rollover line to match. Credits do not survive cancellation. We do not know when that policy changed, so we are stating the current rule with the date we read it rather than guessing at a history.

When the Creator plan stops being enough

Creator is the tier most readers of this page will buy, and it is worth being precise about where it ends, because the wall moved this spring and the price did not.

Until March 2026 Creator sold unlimited avatar videos. It now sells 600 credits a month, which is 30 minutes of Avatar IV video, roughly 200 minutes of Avatar III, or some mix of the two. For a weekly two-minute clip that is comfortable. For a channel shipping daily, or an agency running several clients from one workspace, it is about a week of output, and the rollover buys you one month of slack rather than a real buffer.

Four specific triggers push you off Creator, and they land on different tiers. Needing 4K rather than 1080p is the cheapest one, and it lands on Pro at $49. Needing more capacity is also Pro, which is exactly why the credit ladder exists. Needing a second person in the workspace lands on Business at $149 plus $20 a seat, because Creator and Pro are both single-seat plans with commenting but no collaboration. And needing SCORM export, an LMS integration, interactive quizzes or single sign-on lands on Business too, with no cheaper route.

Before any of those, there is the licence. Free stops being viable the moment the output leaves your own evaluation, because HeyGen's terms restrict free-plan video to personal, non-commercial use, so the first client deliverable is itself an upgrade trigger regardless of how few videos you make.

The one thing no upgrade fixes is duration on the newest engine: Avatar IV caps at 30 minutes per video on every paid tier, Enterprise included.

SCORM, LMS integrations, and SAML SSO on Business

This section did not exist on this page before today, and its absence was the single largest error in our June version. SCORM is the packaging standard that lets a finished video drop into a learning management system as a trackable module, so the platform records who watched it and how far they got. SCORM is what a compliance or training team means when it asks whether a video tool "works with our LMS."

HeyGen's Business plan exports SCORM. It also ships LMS integrations, interactive video with in-video quizzes, link embedding and branching decisions, and SAML single sign-on, all at $149 a month plus $20 a seat. That places the entire learning-and-development bundle one tier below Enterprise and at a published price. Our own Synthesia review and our avatar hub both carried the old, wrong version of this until today, and both are corrected in the same update as this page.

The comparison that matters for a training buyer is now genuinely close. Our Synthesia review covers a tool with a deeper certification trail, holding SOC 2 Type II with ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 42001 plus documented EU data residency, but its SCORM export sits on Enterprise behind a custom quote. HeyGen's sits on a self-serve plan you can buy with a card. Colossyan, built specifically around interactive training, still leads on native quizzing depth, and its SCORM export is no longer Enterprise-only either: it sits on Professional at $59 a month billed yearly. So if tracked completions are the requirement and enterprise procurement is not on the table, HeyGen is a published price rather than a quote, but Colossyan is the cheaper published route to them.

Two limits to note before a rollout. SCIM user provisioning, audit logs, password-protected share URLs and enforced team MFA remain Enterprise-only, so an organisation that provisions users automatically or audits access will still be quoted. And Business seats add people, not credits, so a five-person training team shares the same 1,500 monthly credits unless it tops up.

Named integrations: n8n, Make, HubSpot, Zapier

HeyGen's Business tier lists integrations with n8n, Make, HubSpot and Zapier by name, which is a different proposition from the generic "API access" line most reviews print. For an agency or a freelance builder, those four cover most of what an automation stack actually needs: trigger a render from a CRM record, push a finished video into an email sequence, or generate personalised clips in bulk from a spreadsheet row without writing code against the API or paying for a separate API balance.

Worth setting expectations honestly, because the community record is not clean here. A developer wiring HeyGen into n8n in May 2025 reported that "every time i try to load up the URL of the video generated, I just get a 404 error returned" (r/n8n), and another user hitting API errors was pointed back to the docs to look up error codes (r/heygen, March 2025). Those reports predate the current integration set, but they are the only dated first-hand evidence available on this layer, and the honest summary is that the connectors exist and the polish is unproven.

Security, GDPR, and voice data

For a tool that clones your voice and your likeness, data handling is not a footnote. HeyGen processes biometric data by design: voice samples, and for custom digital twins, video of a real face.

Unlike the retention question below, consent for a digital twin is something HeyGen documents in real detail, in developer documentation rather than the marketing pages most reviews stop at. We read it directly on August 27, 2026. Building a digital twin requires the depicted person to record a short consent statement on camera through a HeyGen-hosted consent page, reading a fixed on-screen script aloud so the system captures voice and motion alongside the words. Enterprise accounts get two further paths: a pre-recorded consent video can be uploaded instead of a live webcam recording, provided the subject is shown clearly reading the same statement, and an Enterprise account that has separately signed an indemnity agreement with HeyGen can skip consent collection through the product entirely, shifting that liability onto the contract instead. One scope limit matters for anyone budgeting around this: consent applies only to digital twins built from a real person's likeness. Photo avatars and prompt-generated avatar characters, HeyGen's own documentation states, "depict no real, identifiable person and do not require consent," so they sit outside this whole process. Against the other AI avatar tools we cover, that puts HeyGen's default path, live, recorded and on camera, roughly level with Synthesia's, and ahead of Colossyan, D-ID and Vidnoz, all three of which require consent by contract but document no comparable step the product itself performs. Commercial rights on the resulting video are a separate question this review already answers above: personal, non-commercial use only on Free, full commercial rights from Creator up.

The access controls are now well documented by tier. SAML single sign-on and multi-factor authentication arrive on Business, and SCIM provisioning, audit logs, enforced team MFA and password-protected share URLs sit on Enterprise. That is a real improvement in what a security reviewer can check off a list without a sales call.

The gap is retention. HeyGen publishes a GDPR compliance page, a security portal, a moderation policy and trust-and-safety documentation, and states that it does not sell user data and offers account deletion. What is still not clearly published is how long cloned voice and custom digital-twin data is retained after deletion. That ambiguity is the issue, not a confirmed violation, and it is the one place where a certification-led competitor still has a concrete edge. If documented retention is a hard requirement in your industry, get it in writing from HeyGen's team before uploading a sample rather than after.

What real users report

The independent record on HeyGen is more mixed than either its G2 score or its marketing suggests, and it clusters around five themes. Each quote below links back to the original comment and carries its date rather than standing as an unsourced paraphrase, and the whole set falls between May 2024 and May 2025, the freshest window our archive search returns for this product.

On avatar quality, the direction is agreed and the destination is not. A user in r/AutoMoguls evaluating explainer tools said of Avatar IV that "the expressions and subtle movements blew me away" (May 2025). In the same week, someone comparing lip-sync tools in r/StableDiffusion was more measured: "Heygen is now a bit better than it has been but the movements beyond the mouth are still stiff at best" (May 2025). A marketer testing avatar video in email reported it passed as real to recipients: "Used HeyGen, added fake play button in email. No one noticed it wasn't really me" (r/Emailmarketing, May 2025).

On cost, the complaint is the credit model rather than the sticker price, and it predates the current ladder. A user in r/ThinkingDeeplyAI did the arithmetic on the then-current Creator allowance and concluded HeyGen was "about $0.60 cents a minute" for the newest avatar engine (May 2025), which is the same calculation we run above and now lands closer to 97 cents. A poster in r/heygen was blunter and built an alternative: "HeyGen pricing is crazy. So I built a simple and more affordable AI video generation tool" (May 2024). A creator running localisation hit the ceiling on a paid plan: "YT auto dubbing doesn't bring results, freelancers seems to be expensive, HeyGen has limits on a paid subsciption" (r/PartneredYoutube, May 2025). And one user pushed back on singling HeyGen out, noting that "Sora, Heygen, Syllaby, Kling, invideo, Argil all cost credits" (r/ManusOfficial, May 2025), which is fair: credit billing is a category norm, not a HeyGen quirk.

On the old Team plan, the two-seat minimum produced exactly the workaround you would expect. A solo user in r/heygen posted that "HeyGen requires a minimum of two seats for the Team plan, and I only need one" and went looking for someone to split it with (May 2025). A reply moved the arrangement to a third-party subscription-splitting broker "which gives the buyer a protection since there is a middle man" (May 2025). That listing priced a single seat at $30 a month, matching the visible pricing card rather than the FAQ text, which is a small independent check on the pricing contradiction described earlier.

On real-time avatars, the one hands-on report is not flattering. A user building an interactive avatar for their website reported that "it takes a lot of setup time and lips are out of sync," that the avatar "is static," and that there were "mouth glitches" (r/heygen, April 2025). Another developer found the API itself gated behind extra spend: "in order to get the API key, you have to also get an additional subscription which is $10" (r/ChatGPTPro, May 2025). Both predate the LiveAvatar split, and both point the same way the current pricing structure does: the real-time layer is the roughest and most separately-billed part of the product family.

On fit, the recurring pattern is that HeyGen is one leg of a stack rather than the whole workflow. A user answering a question about video pitches described the pipeline as "ChatGPT -> HeyGen -> CapCut. Done" (r/AIAssisted, May 2025), and another recommended "combining HeyGen for the avatar with Descript's Overdub or ElevenLabs' voice cloning" (r/SaaSSales, May 2025). One genuine feature gap surfaced repeatedly: a user shopping for a platform noted HeyGen could not "Merge 2 avatars in the same video" (r/ArtificialInteligence, April 2025).

Vendor claim vs. reality

What's changed

• May 2024. A user in HeyGen's own subreddit called the pricing "crazy" and built an alternative tool, the earliest dated pricing complaint in our sample (r/heygen).
• April and May 2025. HeyGen shipped Avatar IV, its fourth-generation single-photo-to-video avatar model, alongside voice mirroring. Multiple dated Reddit threads place the rollout in this window and describe it as a real quality jump (r/heygen).
• June to September 2025. Archived pricing pages show the Team plan live at $39 a seat a month, $30 annually, while the same page's FAQ text quoted $89 and $69 for the identical plan.
• December 1, 2025. The pricing page still shows Free, Creator and Team. Creator sells unlimited videos and one custom interactive avatar. There is no Business plan and no mention of SCORM (archived page).
• By January 15, 2026. Team has gone. Business is live at $149 a month with a $119 annual rate, and SCORM export appears in the feature table for the first time (archived page).
• March 2, 2026. The ladder reads Free, Creator, Pro, Business, Enterprise, with Pro at $99 a month. Creator still sells unlimited videos and Free still lists a 3-minute cap and 720p export (archived page).
• By June 3, 2026. The credit system has replaced unlimited generation. Creator carries 600 credits, Pro has dropped to $49 with 1,000 credits, credit rollover appears, and the free per-video cap tightens from 3 minutes to 1 minute (archived page).
• June 6, 2026. We published the first version of this review, listing a Team plan at roughly $69 a seat, omitting Pro and Business entirely, and stating that credits expire monthly with no rollover.
• August 3, 2026. Every tier re-read at source and corrected here, with the real-time avatar now sold separately as LiveAvatar and the video API sold separately as pay-as-you-go from $5.
• August 27, 2026. Rewrote the passages this page shared with its sibling avatar reviews, and deepened the security section above with HeyGen's own documented consent requirement for custom digital twins, read from its developer documentation the same day.
• September 9, 2026. Re-read the Trustpilot profile in a browser. The score is 3.8 out of 5 across 3,290 reviews, replacing the undated 3.6 this page carried, and the profile's claimed status, paid subscription and "Invited" review tags are now reported alongside it.

Understanding the G2 vs Trustpilot gap

HeyGen's public ratings still disagree, but by less than they did. G2 carries 4.8 out of 5 across 1,966 reviews, read on September 6, 2026. Capterra sits at 4.7 across 315 verified reviews, with ease of use at 4.7 and customer service at 4.6. Trustpilot, which this page previously reported at 2.4 and later at 3.6, carries 3.8 out of 5 across 3,290 reviews, read on September 9, 2026. Neither G2 nor Trustpilot answers a scripted request, so both profiles were read in a browser, which is where these figures come from.

The spread is structural rather than mysterious. G2 and Capterra collect reviews from business buyers rating capability, which is where HeyGen genuinely performs. Trustpilot collects consumer experience, and its negative clusters are consistently about billing rather than output: unexpected renewals, cancellation friction, and unpredictable credit consumption on newer features like Video Agent. Recent Trustpilot praise clusters just as consistently around support responsiveness and avatar realism.

There is a third difference between those pools, and Trustpilot publishes it on the profile itself. HeyGen has had the page claimed since October 2023, holds a paid Trustpilot subscription, and individual reviews there carry Trustpilot's "Invited" tag, which marks a review the company asked the customer to write. Inviting reviews is normal, disclosed practice and it does not make the 3.8 false. It does change what the number is measuring. G2 and Capterra collect buyers who went looking for somewhere to rate a tool, while part of the Trustpilot pool is there because HeyGen sent an invitation, so read that score as solicited consumer feedback rather than as unprompted sentiment.

Because cancellation friction is the single most repeated billing complaint, it is worth knowing the mechanics before you subscribe rather than after. Cancellation is self-serve inside the product, under account settings and the subscription or billing panel, and it stops the next renewal rather than refunding the current period, so cancel before the renewal date rather than on it. Two things circulate in user reports that we could not confirm against HeyGen's own published documentation, and we are naming them as reports rather than policy: some users describe being offered a retention discount at the moment they click cancel, which is worth waiting for if you were leaving over price, and at least one user has described a cancelled account's email address being blocked from re-registering later. If you may want to come back, cancel rather than delete the account, and keep the confirmation email. Anyone treating the annual plan as a way to lock in the current rate should also read the credit terms first, since credits do not survive a lapsed subscription.

The recovery from 2.4 to 3.8 is the more interesting movement, and it is worth reading alongside the credit-rollover change. A large share of the historic complaints came from people surprised that an unused allowance had vanished. Credits now carrying forward a month, or a year on annual billing, removes the exact grievance those reviews describe. We cannot prove one caused the other, but the timing lines up, and the practical advice is unchanged: read the credit terms before you subscribe, not after.

HeyGen vs Synthesia, Colossyan, D-ID, and Vidnoz

The comparison table on this page draws its figures from our own published reviews of those tools, so the numbers stay consistent across the site. The short version reads like this.

Synthesia is the pick when a compliance team signs off the work. Its certification trail is deeper, its data residency is documented, and it bills only the seconds you change when you re-edit, which matters for training video that goes through review cycles. HeyGen answers with better realism, a wider language count and, since January, SCORM at a self-serve price where Synthesia keeps it behind an enterprise quote.

Colossyan is the pick when the training has to be interactive rather than watched, with native quizzes and branching built around instructional design. HeyGen now ships quizzes and branching too, on Business, so the gap there is depth rather than presence.

D-ID sits at the opposite end on cost and scope, animating a single still photograph, entering at $5.90 a month, and keeping its real-time agent API inside its ordinary paid tiers rather than splitting it into a separate product. For a developer who wants one vendor and one invoice, that is a real advantage over HeyGen's three separate balances. The sticker price is the misleading part, though, and the same per-minute arithmetic we ran above settles it. D-ID's $5.90 Lite plan carries 40 credits, roughly 10 minutes of finished video, which is about 59 cents a minute but watermarked on every export. Its $29 Pro plan, the first tier that removes the watermark, carries 60 credits or roughly 15 minutes, which works out to about $1.93 a clean minute against HeyGen Creator's 97 cents at the same $29. D-ID is the cheapest way to test avatar video and roughly twice HeyGen's cost per usable minute once you are shipping it.

If budget is the binding constraint rather than governance, Vidnoz gives away more free watermarked output each day than HeyGen's three videos a month, with weaker realism and thinner documentation to match.

Verdict: who should use HeyGen?

HeyGen scores 4.1 out of 5, down from 4.2. The output quality did not move. The value did, in both directions, and the net is slightly negative for the readers this page mostly serves.

For creators and marketers producing talking-avatar video at volume, HeyGen is still the strongest tool in the category and still the one we would buy. Avatar IV realism and lip-sync lead the field, 175+ languages make localisation cheap, voice cloning is unlimited from $29, and credits now roll over instead of evaporating. The honest caveat is that Creator sold unlimited videos until this spring and now sells 600 credits, which is 30 minutes of Avatar IV a month at the same price. Budget by minutes, pick your engine deliberately, and Pro's credit ladder is there when 30 minutes stops being enough.

For freelancers and agency builders, price the whole stack before you commit. A HeyGen web plan does not include an API key and does not include a real-time avatar. The video API is a separate pay-as-you-go balance from $5, and LiveAvatar is a separate product with its own credits, where an always-on conversational avatar realistically starts around $99 a month. The free plan is not a free client sample either, since its licence covers personal evaluation only, so Creator at $29 is the true entry price for paid work. The named n8n, Make, HubSpot and Zapier integrations on Business are the cheapest route to automation without touching either of those, and they are the reason Business can make sense for a one-person shop that would otherwise never need seats.

For workplace learning and development teams, this is the recommendation that changed. HeyGen now exports SCORM, integrates with an LMS, ships interactive quizzes and branching, and supports SAML single sign-on, all on Business at $149 a month plus $20 a seat. That is tracked completions at a published price, which its closest rival still puts behind an enterprise quote. Two caveats stay: SCIM, audit logs and password-protected sharing are Enterprise-only, and retention periods for cloned voice and digital-twin data are still not clearly documented, which regulated buyers should get in writing first.

One decision rule to close on, because the pricing page will not tell you. Divide each plan by the Avatar IV minutes it funds: Creator is about 97 cents a finished minute, Pro's entry tier about 98 cents, and Business about $1.99. Business is not a volume discount. It is a governance and collaboration purchase that happens to cost twice as much per minute, and knowing that before the demo is worth more than any feature list.

The rest of the field, and where each tool actually wins, is in our best AI avatar generators roundup.