Comparison

Explainer video software compared: what each one costs, and what it actually makes

Eleven tools all say “explainer video” and mean four different products. Here is what each of them charges, what that money actually buys, and the arithmetic nobody puts on a pricing page: what one finished video costs you.

Published 6 September 2026 · 12 min read · every price checked on the vendor’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026

The short version

Every tool below makes something you could call an explainer video, and almost none of them make the same thing. Before the prices, the answer:

• You want a presenter reading your script: Synthesia or HeyGen. Both start at $29 a month, both do the synthetic-human thing well, and neither draws anything.
• You want a blog post turned into captioned stock footage: Pictory or InVideo AI, from $17–$29 a month. Fast, cheap per minute, and the pictures come from a library rather than from your subject.
• You want characters, scenes and full creative control: Vyond or Powtoon. Vyond is the strongest of these and the most expensive at $99 a month billed monthly; Powtoon starts at $15 a month billed yearly. Both are editors — you supply the hours.
• You want one video, not a subscription: per-video pricing. ExplainVids is €3 for a single narrated motion-graphics video with no monthly plan attached.
• You want it to look genuinely bespoke: a freelancer or a studio, at roughly $500–$3,000 per finished minute and up. Nothing in the software list competes with a good animator; they compete on price and on the calendar.

Four products, one name

“Explainer video software” is a search term, not a category. Underneath it are four quite different machines, and picking the wrong one costs more than picking the wrong price.

1. Avatar tools — a synthetic person reads your script

Synthesia and HeyGen generate a photoreal presenter, lip-synced to a voice, standing in front of a slide. What ends up on screen is a person talking. They are exceptional at corporate training, onboarding, policy updates and anything localised into a dozen languages, because the same script in another language is another render rather than another shoot.

What they are not is animation. If the point of your video is a number moving, a comparison landing, or a process unfolding, an avatar is a talking head in front of it.

2. Assemblers — your text over stock footage

Pictory, InVideo AI, Fliki and Lumen5 take a script, an article or a URL, split it into lines, and match each line to a clip from a stock library, with captions burned on and a synthetic voice over the top. The output rate is remarkable: Pictory’s entry plan includes 200 video minutes a month.

The catch is in the pictures. Stock footage is generic by definition, and a clip of a smiling person at a laptop is what you get for a sentence about your onboarding flow. It works for social repurposing and news-style content. It does not work when the video has to show your specific thing.

3. Animation studios — the drag-and-drop editors

Vyond, Powtoon and Animaker are real editors with a timeline, character libraries, props, transitions and an asset browser. The ceiling is high: Vyond in particular produces work that reads as professionally animated, and companies use it for exactly that.

The cost is not really the subscription. It is that these are tools, not services — the first video takes an afternoon and the tenth still takes an hour, and the person spending those hours is you. That is the trade every one of them is asking you to make.

4. Generators — a script in, a finished film out

The newest category, and the one ExplainVids is in: you describe the video, and a script, a voice performance, the motion graphics and the render happen without an editor being opened. There is no timeline to learn and no stock library, because nothing is assembled — the scenes are drawn to the words.

The honest limitation is control. A generator gives you fewer knobs than Vyond does, on purpose, and if your video needs a specific character doing a specific thing in frame 40, this whole category is the wrong shop.

The fifth option is not software at all — a freelancer or a studio, which is still the right answer more often than a software comparison page likes to admit.

What each one costs

Entry price, what that plan actually includes, and what the free tier does to your video if there is one. Prices are the vendor’s own, read on 6 September 2026.

The number that matters: cost per video

A monthly price is not a price. What you actually pay per finished video depends entirely on how many you make, and the answer is brutal at low volume: the first video on a $99 plan costs $99.

Here is the same arithmetic across four subscriptions and one per-video product, at the month-to-month rate — because someone making their first video is not signing an annual contract — for 60-second videos.

Two things fall out of that, and the second one is not in our favour.

• Below about four videos a month, per-video pricing wins by a wide margin — and it keeps winning in the months you make none, which is the part a pricing page never models. A subscription’s per-video price is only real if the allowance is used; an unused month is a full month billed.
• Above about ten a month, the subscriptions win. At twelve videos Synthesia works out at $2.42 against our €2.92, and Powtoon and Vyond stop capping you at all. If explainer videos are a weekly habit rather than an occasional need, a plan is the cheaper shape and you should buy one.

The bill is only half the cost, though. Vyond at $8.25 a video also costs you the hours to make twelve videos in an editor, and Pictory at pennies a minute costs you a stock clip standing in for your product. Which brings us to the part a table cannot hold.

What a price table cannot show

Where the pictures come from

This is the single biggest difference between these tools and it never appears on a pricing page. An avatar tool shows a person. An assembler shows a stock library. An editor shows whatever you built. A generator draws the scene from the sentence being spoken. Four completely different videos, all sold as “explainer video software”.

Whether the animation is cut to the narration

Most tools time the picture to a fixed slide length and let the voice fall where it falls. The difference is obvious the moment you watch: a figure that appears two seconds after it is said reads as a slideshow with audio, and one that lands on the word reads as a film. If you are evaluating tools, play a sample with the sound on and watch for exactly that.

What happens to your numbers

Anything that generates content from a prompt can invent a statistic, and a confident wrong figure burned into a video is not correctable afterwards — it is out there, in the render, in the captions. Ask any tool you are considering what it does with a brief that contains no figures. The safe behaviour is to draw nothing.

What editing costs after the first version

The first version is never the last one. In an editor like Vyond, changing a line means finding the scene, re-recording the voice and re-timing what follows. In a generator, it should mean editing the sentence and re-rendering, with the untouched lines keeping the performance they already had. Ask what a one-word change costs.

Watermarks, resolution and commercial rights

Free tiers are marketing. Powtoon’s free export is 720p with a watermark and no commercial use — that last part matters if the video is for a business, which it is. Synthesia’s free tier keeps their logo on your video. HeyGen’s gives you three one-minute videos a month, branded. Check the commercial-rights line before you plan around a free plan.

What each one is genuinely best at

Synthesia — training and localisation

If you need the same fifteen-minute onboarding module in eight languages and updated quarterly, nothing else here is close. 1080p exports on every paid tier, 12 minutes a month at $29. The weakness is that everything is a presenter in front of a slide.

HeyGen — avatars, with more video around them

Similar shape to Synthesia at a similar price, with a stronger editor and 4K on the $49 Pro tier. Its free tier is the most genuinely useful of the bunch for a look around: three videos a month, one minute each, watermarked.

Pictory — turning writing you already have into video

200 video minutes a month for $29 is the best raw throughput on this page, and the blog-post-to-video path is what it was built for. Judge it on whether stock footage suits your subject, because that is what you are buying.

InVideo AI — the cheapest way in

$17 a month is the lowest paid entry point of the AI tools, with unlimited watermark-free exports. Credits rather than minutes, so model the volume before committing.

Vyond — the highest ceiling in software

The most capable animation tool here, and priced like it: $99 a month month-to-month, $58 on an annual plan, one seat. Worth it if somebody is going to spend real time in it. Expensive if the plan is “we’ll make a few videos”.

Powtoon and Animaker — the affordable editors

Both start around $15 a month on annual billing and both are real editors. Powtoon caps video length by tier (10 minutes on Lite, 20 on Professional); Animaker does the same (5 minutes on Basic, 15 on Starter). Good value, same hidden cost as Vyond: your time.

After Effects — no ceiling and no help

$22.99 a month buys the tool professionals actually use, and nothing else — no script, no voice, no templates worth shipping, and a learning curve measured in months. If you already know it, you were never reading this. If you do not, the cheapest AI subscription here is less expensive than one day of your time.

Freelancers and studios — still the best videos

At $500–$3,000 per finished minute for a freelancer and $3,000– $15,000 for a 60-second studio piece, this is where genuinely bespoke work lives: original characters, a real narrative, a human voice actor, sound design, and somebody whose job is the result. The trade is money and a calendar — one to four weeks, and a revision round that costs a conversation rather than a click.

Software wins on the tenth video, the Tuesday-afternoon video and the video that has to change on Thursday. It does not win the brand film.

Where ExplainVids fits — and where it does not

We built it for the case none of the above serves well: you need one specific explainer, this week, and you are not going to learn an editor or start a subscription to get it.

You describe the video — or paste a URL and let it read the page — and it writes the script, performs it as real narration, draws the scenes to the words, burns in the captions and renders an MP4. A single video is €3, there is no monthly plan attached to it, and nothing carries a watermark on any tier.

Specifically:

• Every animation is cut to the voice. The narration is generated first and measured to the word, and the timeline is built from those measurements — so a number appears on the syllable that says it, not two seconds later.
• No stock footage and no avatars. The scenes are drawn: figures, comparisons, lists, maps, charts, rebuilt interface panels. If you point it at a website it takes that site’s own accent colour and redraws it in that.
• It will not invent a statistic. Figures come from your brief. A brief with no numbers in it produces no data scenes rather than plausible ones, by design.
• Editing is a sentence, not a timeline. Change a line and only that line is re-recorded and re-timed; every untouched line keeps the performance it already had.

And the things it does not do, since this is a comparison and not an advertisement:

• No character animation. If you want a cartoon person walking across a scene, Vyond is the answer and it is not close.
• Pay-as-you-go tops out at two minutes and renders at 720p. 1080p, both aspect ratios on one film and higher frame rates are the €21/mo Pro plan.
• Fewer knobs than an editor, on purpose. You can rewrite any line, reorder the scenes, change the accent colour and re-render. You cannot keyframe.
• No free tier. Every video costs real money to make before you see it — a script, a voice performance and a full render — so instead of a free tier funded by paying customers, the first one is simply €3.

How to choose, in about a minute

• Will a person on screen carry the message? Yes → Synthesia or HeyGen. No → keep reading.
• Does the video have to show your specific thing? Yes → skip the stock-footage assemblers. Generic footage is what they are.
• Is somebody going to spend real hours in an editor? Yes → Vyond, or Powtoon at a third the price. No → a generator.
• How many videos a month? Fewer than four → pay per video. More than ten → buy a plan; the arithmetic above is unambiguous.
• Is this the brand film the company is judged on? Yes → hire an animator. None of this software is trying to be that, including ours.

Questions

How these prices were checked

Every figure in the table was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026, not from a review site. Two exceptions are marked where they appear: Fliki publishes credits rather than a monthly dollar figure, so its ~$28 comes from third-party listing data; and the freelancer and studio ranges are industry benchmarks rather than one company’s rate card.

Software prices move, and comparison pages rot quietly. If you are reading this well after 6 September 2026, treat the numbers as a starting shape and check the two or three you actually care about.

Related: what an explainer video costs if you are weighing software against hiring people, Synthesia alternatives if you are leaving an avatar tool, and SaaS explainer videos for which videos to make in the first place.

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