HeyGen makes videos of a person speaking without filming one. You pick from roughly 500 stock avatars or train a custom "digital twin" from your own footage, paste or generate a script, and it renders a lip-synced video with a synthetic or cloned voice. The second major function is video translation: upload an existing video and it re-voices the speaker in another language while re-timing the mouth movements to match.
The usual buyers are marketing teams producing localized ad and social variants, sales teams sending personalized outreach videos, and L&D teams turning slide decks and documents into training modules. Beyond the web editor there is a REST API, a CLI and an MCP server, so avatar videos can be generated programmatically, plus integrations with Canva, HubSpot and LMS platforms.
What separates it from Synthesia and similar tools is breadth inside one subscription: avatars, voice cloning, dubbing, interactive real-time avatars and slide-to-video all draw from the same credit pool rather than requiring separate products.
The pricing catch: the sticker price is not the real price. Everything is metered in credits, and the newest models cost the most — Avatar IV/V video and Video Agent burn 20 credits per minute while the older Avatar III costs 3, so your effective cost can swing roughly sevenfold depending on which model you pick. Creator's 600 monthly credits is about 30 minutes of top-tier avatar video.
