The 9 best AI video generators in 2024

Consuming video is easy. Producing good video is not. Putting together a script, getting all the footage, and editing everything to perfection—or as close as possible—can eat up enormous chunks of your time.

As it does for everything right now, AI has a few solutions to slash the time it takes to go from idea to MP4. I went in search of the best AI tools for creating videos, and as it turns out, there are already a ton of amazing options.

From smart video editing software to generative text-to-video apps, there are tools that will help you do whatever you want: be that running your own YouTube channel, creating more engaging content for social media, or repurposing content to keep all your business's online channels fresh. After almost a month of testing, here are my picks this year for the best AI video generators.

The best AI video editing software

• Runway for generative AI video

• Descript for editing video by editing the script

• Wondershare Filmora for polishing video with AI tools

• Capsule for simplifying video production workflows with AI

• Fliki for social media videos

• Peech for content marketing teams

• Synthesia for using digital avatars

• Vyond for animated character videos from a prompt

• Visla for turning a script into a video

What makes the best AI video generator?

The best AI tools for video creation help you increase your production quantity and value without increasing the time spent working on it. They cut the time it takes from script to final result by providing templates, tools to speed up editing, and shortcuts to polish audio and video.

There are three broad categories in this list. 

• Video editors with AI editing tools, meant for speeding up the editing process.

• Generative apps that take your prompts and generate a video output on the spot using a generative AI text, audio, image, or video.

• Video productivity apps that use AI to help you create content faster for multiple marketing channels or platforms.

Regardless of these sub-categories, here's what I looked for as I searched for the best AI video generator:

• AI. All these apps use artificial intelligence to power their features.

• High-quality video output. These apps should let you export video that can run beautifully on small or large screens. All the apps on this list export to 720p at worst and 4k at best, in a variety of aspect ratios.

• Customization. Can you add your own content? How much can you customize? Is it easy to make changes?

• Support and ease of use. Since AI video editing is a new-ish thing, I was looking for apps that beginners could use; that includes offering content to help you take advantage of all the possibilities.

• Unique features. Some apps bring their unique spin to video creation or offer something that's useful to improve productivity, production value, or both.

This year's update brought dozens of new possibilities to the table across all sub-categories. I considered all new ones while retesting the apps already present on the list, as there were major changes across the board. I started from templates where available or uploaded my own content and kept building while following platform guides and documentation. To wrap up the tests, I exported the videos to see how good everything looked.

You may be surprised not to find on this list apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Final Cut. While these apps include native AI features or AI plug-ins and extensions, they require a deeper understanding of video editing, which doesn't make them as accessible as the tools in this list. But if you're a pro, here's a list of the best video editing software to check out.

The best AI video generators at a glance

Best AI video generator for generative AI

Runway (Web, iOS)

Runway pros:

• Advanced AI tools for unique results

• Great help content

Runway cons:

• Steep learning curve

Runway feels like a magic wand, ready to turn your imagination into pixels with just words and a starting image. If you're trying AI video generation for the first time, get ready to have an experience—a really cool one at that.

The main dish on the menu is Gen-3 Alpha, the latest high-fidelity video generation model. Start writing your prompt by describing the camera movement and aesthetics, move to the content of the scene, and top it off with additional details (here's a prompting guide to help you predict the results). It's only accessible once you hop on a paid plan, and it will burn through your credits quickly, but it's immensely fun to brainstorm ways to control the output.

Getting exactly what you want will be difficult, especially when starting out, but understanding how the model thinks through your prompts can help you get good results. Thankfully, Runway has an Academy with plenty of guides and videos to show you how the platform works.

There are two other models available: Gen-3 Alpha Turbo is the less expensive, lower-quality version of its bigger brother. Gen-2 is an older model: it's not as jaw-dropping as Gen-3, but it has many more controls to help you learn. For example, in addition to the prompt, you can choose camera movements, change visual styles, and configure subject movements within the shot.

But text-to-video isn't the only trick in the book. Runway has a large collection of AI-powered tools to remove backgrounds, create super-slow motion video, and generate subtitles—among many others that work with sound and static images. The platform has a serious video-editing vibe, but all the tools are surprisingly easy to use, even if it's hard to understand what's really going on behind the scenes.

Can Runway completely replace real-world footage? Not yet. Maybe not ever. But if you have dreamy, abstract projects that could use mind-bending visuals, this is definitely the best match for you. Be sure to click the Runway Watch tab to see AI film festival submissions to get an idea of the narrative and visual possibilities.

Runway price: Free plan available for 125 one-time credits. Standard plan at $15/month unlocks Gen-3 High Fidelity, adds 625 monthly credits (with the option to buy more), no watermark, and higher export quality.

Best AI video generator for editing video by editing the script

Descript (Web, Windows, Mac)

Descript pros:

• Intuitive controls

• Edit video by editing the transcription

Descript cons:

• Transcription is inaccurate from time to time

When I record video, I usually say much more than I'm actually going to use in the final version—far too much, actually. Like, in the region of 10 to 20 times more. That turns into late-night, never-ending trim fests that I wish I could avoid. If you're like me, Descript is a huge time saver that can potentially give you back a few hours of well-deserved rest.

To begin with, it generates a transcript of everything you say along with a set of scenes, separating the video track automatically. Instead of scrolling through the timeline to split or trim, simply highlight the parts of the transcript that you want gone, and Descript edits it out for you. No more going back and forth to see if the cut is well done: you can edit video just as you would a text document.

Once you've got the script under control, you can divide your video into scenes. To do so, type a forward slash in the script to separate each one. You'll notice this will split the video on the vertical timeline on the left. That allows you to add, for instance, some B-roll: click on the scene's image, and then on the media library on the top. You can search for high-quality stock video and add it to the project without leaving the editor window.

When you hit play, you'll see that Descript cuts to the B-roll exactly where you marked it. The user experience to implement jump cuts, visual elements, and SFX is the same, so you can mark the entirety of your script as you go, and then add all the good stuff later. This workflow is a huge time-saver. But if you prefer the classic timeline experience, it's still there: look to the bottom of the screen, and control your footage there.

Now that you have these editing powers, you can speak freely while recording, knowing you won't have to watch everything from top to bottom to extract all the gold nuggets. That's not the end of it: Descript offers more cool AI goods with its Underlord toolkit, helping you refine the audio to studio quality, run auto multicam to cut to whoever's speaking, and even generate highlights and clips for you to post on short-form socials.

And while you're working on saving time, connect Descript with Zapier so you can move data across thousands of apps and automate more parts of your video creation workflow. Here's a sample of what it can do, or discover even more ways to automate Descript.

Descript price: Free plan available for up to 1 transcription hour. Hobbyist plan at $19/user/month increases transcription to 10 hours, removes the watermark, and improves export quality to 1080p.

Best AI video editor for polishing your video with AI tools

Wondershare Filmora (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)

Wondershare Filmora pros:

• Traditional video editing tool with AI features

• Lots of learning resources

Wondershare Filmora cons:

• Runs slow on low-end computers

Wondershare Filmora has been around for a really, really long time. I remember using it over 15 years ago for the first time. Despite the age, it's not stuck in time—quite the opposite. It has a package of AI features that improve video quality without having to enroll in a pro course or dump dozens of hours into little tweaks.

So, what are these AI features? Here's the shortlist:

• AI smart cutout lets you cut objects out of scenes by painting their area on the screen.

• AI audio denoise helps you keep background noise under control.

• AI audio stretch helps you stretch music for eight seconds longer to match a cut to another scene.

• AI motion tracking lets you identify and blur faces to maintain privacy (or paste funny faces to make meme videos—your choice).

• AI remove background lets you paste an image of a runner jogging on the moon without the billions of space program investment (or risk of death).

• AI silence detection lets you remove hesitations and make snappy jump cuts without hassle.

All these features are easy to use, coming together into a fully-fledged video editing app. If you have trouble using them, Wondershare has landing pages on their website to explain each one in depth. There are plenty of other creativity and productivity features, from a template library that quickly puts together a video based on your footage, to auto beat sync, which helps you keep your cuts aligned with the music blasting on your audio track.

You can make changes to the settings of your video when exporting, choosing the format, resolution, quality, and even frame rate. If you want to save time when publishing, you can connect your YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo account to launch your video faster. One last handy feature I found: once you toggle Auto Highlight in the video export window, Filmora will generate a quick 15-second video highlight for TikTok or a 60-second one for YouTube Shorts, in addition to the main file.

And if you want to try out Wondershare's take on AI avatar media, be sure to check out Virbo, their new platform for creating synthetic talking head videos.

Wondershare Filmora price: Free plan available with video watermark. Quarterly plan goes for $49.99/year, and you can choose to buy Filmora for $99.99 in a one-time payment.

Best AI video editor for simplifying video production workflows with AI

Capsule (Web, prefers Google Chrome)

Capsule pros:

• Easy to create and apply design systems

• Apply dynamic visual elements with a few clicks

Capsule cons:

• Expensive

Creating videos with tight editing, crisp visuals, and consistent branding is hard enough, especially if you don't have an in-house media pro for the final touches. With Capsule, you won't have to accept a publishing slowdown to maintain quality, nor splurge on expensive talent to make everything look great.

All the features in the platform—both AI and non-AI—are tuned to help businesses with their video challenges as they scale. Once you upload your clips, you'll get a transcript, and you can edit the video by hitting backspace on the words you want to remove. Adding effects is mysterious at the beginning but becomes intuitive once you understand how to do it: highlight the part of the transcript and select whether to add a Capsule design or your own media as B-roll.

Capsule designs are a big part of the platform's value. You don't have to add text and then format it depending on the info you want to display. Instead, these elements are pre-made based on how you want to use them:

• Add speaker identification to quickly add the name and title of the person in the shot.

• Choose dynamic captions to introduce stylish text subtitles for emphasis.

• Introduce a stylish call to action to suggest something the viewer can do.

All of these are animated, fading in and out, sometimes expanding or contracting to attract attention in a minimalistic way. The aesthetic looks good and doesn't interfere with the content, adding that extra shine that would've taken hours for you to nail in a traditional video editor. While there's AI in the background, you can click CoProducer at the top of the screen to autocut gaps, suggest a soundtrack, and bring your original audio up to studio level.

Beyond these useful tools, Capsule has shortcuts for adapting your video to multiple channels. On the right side of the CoProducer button, click to add other aspect ratios to the project you're working on. As you toggle between each, you'll see the preview update with the safe zones. The platform automatically resizes and changes the behavior for most of the visual elements, but you may still have to tweak the positioning of a few objects or subjects on the screen (be sure to take a good look at every framing before exporting).

Capsule pricing: Free plan available for up to 3 exports. Business plan at $99/month unlocks unlimited exports.

Best AI video generator for producing social media videos

Fliki (Web)

Fliki pros:

• Quickly create social media content

• Simple and effective text-to-speech intonation controls

Fliki cons:

• Not very flexible

Fliki is great for creating videos ready for social media. The core of it is combining text-to-speech with your video, letting you control the rhythm and enunciation. And while it has a generative text-to-video option available on the paid plan, the best part about it is how much time it saves in producing video ready to post.

It's very simple to use. When you start a new project, you'll see boxes to input your script. If you click on the voice's name, you can browse a library of voices and pick your favorite one. To adjust the tone, pitch, and pauses, highlight the text you want to change and adjust the appropriate sliders. When you play it back, the differences are noticeable. I like how much you can change the feel of the voice with such simple controls.

Customizing your video is as simple as clicking on the image to the right of the text. There, you can either upload your own content or browse a good match from a content library directly within Fliki. There may be a few hiccups when previewing the final result on the app, but once you render the video, everything will look as expected.

There are two other fields where Fliki is useful. One is for podcasting: you can create your podcast page right here and write the podcast instead of recording your own voice. When your episode is ready, you can publish via RSS to major podcasting platforms. The other one is for creating audiobooks: add your book as a project to the app, add each chapter, and then write or paste in the text. Add finishing touches as necessary.

Fliki pricing: Free plan available with up to 5 minutes/month, watermarked video in 720p. Standard plan goes for $28/month, raising the limits to 180 minutes, removing the watermark, and bumping the quality to 1080p.

Best AI video generator for content marketing teams

Peech (Web, prefers Google Chrome)

Peech pros:

• Intuitive workflow

• Customizable design for video visual elements

Peech cons:

• Steep pricing

Does repurposing content make you feel tired before you even start? I feel your pain. Looking at the same assets and pumping out content to obey every channel's target audience and technical specs is no one's idea of fun. Peech will speed up that process.

Add your brand kit to begin. Enter your logo and color scheme, and Peech will use these assets to automatically brand all your videos. When you start adding your media, it will detect faces and prompt you to enter their name and role in your company. This way, every time this person appears in a future video, you'll see the name and role card close to their face.

Every time you add a new video, Peech will add these elements along with customizable subtitles. I like how you can highlight a few words and apply your brand colors to make them stand out. The first draft that Peech offers is already pretty good, so you won't spend a lot of time making adjustments—but if you'd like to, the app offers a transcript and timeline so you can select more sections. In this editor screen, you'll also be able to remove awkward silences and snip filler words to keep your content snappy and engaging. 

Since Peech is all about scale, it packs in shortcuts to help you increase content quality without blocking more time on your schedule. Adding a background will make your video pop out, making it easier to stack text and other visual elements with real-world footage. Or click the Intro & Outro tab on the editor to quickly add these two moments to each video, tightening up the branding and introducing a call to action. You can also add a song directly from within the platform, wrapping up the editing experience.

After that, cut straight to choosing aspect ratios and video length, and get to exporting. Rinse and repeat—but finally with time to look at the data, do content strategy, and pepper the calendar with more planned posts. 

Peech pricing: Free plan available for 1 user and 2 videos/month with watermark. Creator plan starts at $99/month, raising the cap to 10 videos/month, 60-minute upload limit, and no watermark.

Best AI video generator for using digital avatars

Synthesia (Web)

Synthesia pros:

• High-quality AI avatars

• Multi-language support

Synthesia cons:

• Not entirely believable when seen on large screens

What do you do when you have to record training videos but everyone at the office is camera shy? If hiring a crew and an actor isn't an option, Synthesia is surely the second best: you can browse a library of dozens of digital real-looking avatars from all points of the world. Then, choose the voice that best matches the body, and you're ready to input your script.

The user interface is simple and focuses a lot on this core feature. Once you add the script, Synthesia will start working its magic to make the avatar move the lips and body in a convincing way. You can quickly translate the entire text into another language by clicking on a dropdown menu. The avatar will zip from English to French faster than you can say quoi.

You may be thinking: how good are these avatars? They're good, but they still can't replace humans. If you're watching full-screen, you can catch a few unnatural movements. But get this: I was testing CRM software a while back, and there was an onboarding video. At that time, I went through the whole thing blissfully unaware that the person on that video was an AI avatar. I only recognized the avatar when testing Synthesia for this list. Fooled me.

If you want to add more value to your knowledge base, these avatars will do a good job, at least until you have the budget and time to hire real people to do it. But if you're planning to use this on a presentation with a big screen, I'd say it's not ready for that—not yet, at least.

Apart from picking your favorite avatar, Synthesia lets you add extra scenes to the video, so you can add a few slides with text from a series of pre-made layouts. You can customize the text and the look to fit your brand, and you can upload your own footage and have the avatar sit on a corner of the video talking away as you demonstrate features on your app.

I tested three other AI avatar apps for this piece, but Synthesia is far-and-away the best one. The text-to-speech video generation is the best, and the avatar's movements are the most natural. It's at the bleeding edge as far as avatar-based AI video goes.

And while you get AI avatar sidekicks to do your work on camera for you, you can also get Synthesia to work with your other apps without effort. Connect Synthesia to Zapier and start automating across your entire tech stack. Learn more about how to automate Synthesia, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Synthesia price: Free plan available with 9 avatars and 36 video minutes available per year. Personal plan starts at $29/month for accessing 125+ avatars, 3 personal avatars, and up to 10 minutes of video per month.

Best AI video generator for creating animated characters from a prompt

Vyond (Web)

Vyond pros:

• Versatile: video editor, AI avatars, character videos, and more

• Plenty of help content

Vyond cons:

• Lowest paid plan includes a Vyond watermark in your videos

When you're struggling to find good stock footage for a training video—or can't find anyone in the company with good camera presence—you have to get creative. Animated character videos can help convey actions and circumstances without having to hire a creative team to act them out or rely on lengthy explanations. Instead, you can build them with a prompt with Vyond.

The tool that specializes in this is called Vyond Go. On the dashboard, click the Create button and then select the Text to video option. Enter your prompt, choose the setting, and hit Generate. It'll take care of everything, from the script, objects on the scene, movements, and voiceover, building a first draft that's actually very close to the final thing.

If you want to tweak the video, click the dropdown button on the top right of the screen, and go to Vyond Studio. Like other options on this list, Vyond offers lots of tools in a thorough timeline-based interface, where you can change soundtracks, add and remove scenes, and mix stock media into the project. If you can't get a character to move or behave the way you want, you can film yourself doing the action and the platform will translate that into the character movement using AI. 

This is already a lot as far as AI goes, but there are more useful extras here. Despite the large variety in available props, you can generate new ones and add them to your scenes. You can ditch the busy office sounds with background noise removal and also quickly translate these videos to other languages.

While the animated character video use case is a bit niche, Vyond offers general video-editing tools for other needs as well. If you bring your own real-world footage in for a trim, you can use all the tools to create good video in the browser-based editor. It recently added an AI avatar generator as well, making it a well-rounded AI video editing tool.

Vyond price: Essential plan at $49/month for a single user offers 720p video export, Vyond Go, and access to Vyond Studio.

Best AI text-to-video generator for AI tool variety

Visla (Web)

Visla pros:

• Good text script generation

• Accurate AI video stock suggestions

Visla cons:

• Not a lot of help or guides available

No script? No problem. Visla can generate a straightforward video script with short, to-the-point paragraphs. Next, you can feed that script into another AI engine that will search a stock image and video library to find the content that would make sense with the words on your script. The final result is a video that looks ready to publish with decent editing and a nice flow.

Both of these features are already pretty solid, but there's more. You can directly record video from your camera into the platform either the classic way or with a teleprompter, helping you stick to the script without having to dart your eyes off the frame.

If your speaker hesitates frequently, Visla will use AI to cut the filler words and the uhs and ums, saving you the time of having to edit them out yourself or leaving them in the final version of the video.

To make it easy to control the off-topic moments during recording, it also offers a text-based video editing tool that resembles Descript, so you don't have to look through the timeline and snip it yourself—but there is a timeline if you want to go through the traditional video-editing workflow.

Lastly, if you run a lot of video meetings and use that for content creation of some sort, Visla can also double as a meeting assistant, recording your meetings so you can save them for the long run. More than that, you can extract snippets of these meetings to share with your team.

Visla feels really simple and powerful at the same time, offering a useful toolbox to shorten the time it takes to have a good video ready for publishing and sharing with others.

Visla price: Free plan offers up to 50 minutes of video, 3 hours of transcription, and 10GB of cloud storage. Premium costs $24/month, removing limits for video duration and upping transcription to 10 hours and storage to 100GB.

More generative AI video tools

The generative AI video market is expanding, with lots of new companies and models arriving at the scene. I think Runway is the best generative AI video creator at the moment, but I came across a few other fun ones that can be worth a try.

• Stable Video is on par with Runway models on some evaluations, but the online app, while versatile, doesn't offer many controls. The video model delivers impressive images but still struggles in some simple camera movements.

• Pika is a cute tool that produces shiny, beautiful images with simple controls. It only generates camera movements and very simple movement for the subject, so there's a ways to go here.

• Luma Dream Machine shows promise. With cool camerawork and whimsical lighting—even if you don't engineer your prompt too much—it lives up to its dream machine tag. It has one of the best guides out there, offering advice on creative process, starting from Midjourney image generations to translating that into dynamic video shots.

• PixVerse produces cool results too. It does good subject movement, even if the interactions between objects are still a major issue—which is true for all AI video models currently on the market, to be fair. Definitely one to try out.

You can try all of these for free, so I'd say give them a whirl to see how different they all are.

What about Sora, OpenAI's AI video model?

OpenAI's Sora made its first appearance last year, showcasing a few mind-blowing examples on the product page. But OpenAI believes the model is too good and could be a dangerous deep fake creator tool if made public. Right now, only security researchers and some creatives have closed access, and there's still no estimate for a release date.

Full list of AI video alternatives

AI video is getting very competitive as a category. If you'd like to explore all the alternatives to the main apps that I showcased in this list, here's a quick list for easy reference:

• Canva's video editor has a browser-based media editing experience, including generative AI powered by Runway.

• Kapwing is a Filmora alternative offering equivalent AI-powered tools as well as an AI stock media video tool.

• Virbo is Wondershare's solution for creating AI avatar content.

• invideo is a Fliki alternative for creating social media content starting from a single prompt, including stock media videos, not just static images.

• Typeframes is a Fliki alternative for product videos, sharing a subscription with revid.ai.

• Munch is a Peech alternative for long-to-short repurposing while exploring trending topics.

• HeyGen is a Synthesia alternative for unique AI tools.

What's the best AI video maker?

AI-generated videos are here—it's time to embrace them. The AI video generators on this list will save you time, smooth out your content creation schedule, and increase the final production value. Most have free plans or at least a free trial, so you can take a look before committing. Make sure to carve out some time on your schedule to see which one fits your and your team's needs. And then start creating.

Related reading:

• The best AI productivity tools

• The best AI photo editors

• The best AI marketing tools

• The best AI voice generators

This article was originally published in March 2023. The most recent update was in September 2024.