On 24 March 2026, OpenAI announced that it is discontinuing Sora.
The web and app experiences will be unavailable from 26 April 2026, and the Sora API will stop working on 24 September 2026. This means that Sora will first become inaccessible in the official apps and then on all other platforms, including Overchat AI.
Sora 2 is still the most popular AI video generator on Overchat AI. In this article, we’ll discuss the best Sora 2 alternatives for when the video generator goes offline — and since Sora 2 is an older model from September 2025, there are several even more powerful AI video generators you can start using right now on Overchat AI.
OpenAI is discontinuing Sora. The app shuts down April 26, 2026, and the API follows on September 24, 2026.
The reason. Sora was costing OpenAI ~$1M/day with a shrinking user base, and the company is reallocating compute toward coding tools and enterprise products.
Sora 2 was genuinely loved. It still ranks competitively on quality benchmarks, so its disappearance leaves a real gap.
The best Sora 2 alternatives in 2026. Several newer models match or beat Sora 2 performance — both in benchmarks and subjectively. The list includes HappyHorse 1.0, Seedance 2.0, Kling O3, and Grok Imagine Video.
HappyHorse 1.0. An open-source model that claimed the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena for both T2V and I2V shortly after release.
Seedance 2.0. A model by ByteDance with 2K resolution, native audio, and up to 12 reference files per generation.
Kling O3. A model from Chinese AI company Kuaishou — supports multi-shot generation in a single prompt, up to 4 character references, 6 shots per pass, and native audio.
Grok Imagine Video. This is a model from xAI: the fastest and cheapest option, offering very good quality. It has a 720p resolution, allows you to create 15-second clips and has generation times of around 30 seconds. It also has a less strict content policy.
If you’re an official Sora 2 app user, export your content before 26 April 2026. After that date, user data will be permanently deleted.
What’s Happening?
About Sora 2. Sora 2 is a text-to-video and image-to-video generator created by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. It launched in September 2025, and for most of its life it was one of the most-loved AI video generators on the market — the app was the #1 download in the iOS Photo & Video category within 24 hours of release.
Why OpenAI decided to shut down Sora 2. The short answer: running Sora 2 is not profitable for OpenAI, and they're pivoting to pursue the enterprise segment instead of AI video-generation.
According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Sora is burning through roughly $1 million in computing power every day, while the user base is decreasing — down from a peak of around a million, to below 500,000. Meanwhile, OpenAI is investing many engineering hours in Sora, whereas its main competitor Anthropic is focusing on developing enterprise and developer products, such as Claude Code — a potentially more lucrative and important market for OpenAI. Discontinuing Sora would free up the GPUs required for training coding tools and enterprise-focused models. For creators who love Sora 2, this really hurts.
What to do next? Switch to a Sora 2 alternative — the rest of the AI video space has not been standing still, and several of the models that launched in early 2026 now match or beat Sora 2 — below are the four most credible alternatives to have on your radar before the September deadline.
If you use the official Sora 2 app, also be sure to export your content before 26 April 2026. After that date, user data will be permanently deleted.
Where to generate AI videos after Sora 2 shutdown? On Overchat AI, users can access all the models discussed in this article, as well as generate with Sora 2 through September 2026 — past the shut down of the official app in April 2026.
What is it.HappyHorse 1.0 is an open-source video generation model that quietly appeared on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena leaderboard in early April 2026 without a press release, or any public organization claiming credit. Within a couple of weeks it was sitting at #1 for both text-to-video and image-to-video, ahead of Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1, and Runway Gen-4.5. Artificial Analysis themselves used the word "pseudonymous" when adding it to the arena.
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Who created HappyHorse 1.0. Community speculation points toward an Asia-based lab — possibly Alibaba's WAN team.
Open source model. It’s highly unusual for a video generation model to be open sourced, but in case of HappyHorse, the model base model, distilled model, super-resolution module, and inference code have all been released with commercial rights.
The video quality is genuinely impressive. In the context of the For Sora 2 shutdown, it’s good to know that, thanks to HappyHorse's open-source nature, it won't disappear if a company decides to shut it down.
Support is not widely available yet, but public access will be rolled out more broadly across more platforms around June–July.
Specs:
Max resolution: 1080p
Max duration: 8s
Native audio: Yes
Multi-shot: No
Generation time: ~38 seconds at 1080p
2. Seedance 2.0
What is it. Seedance 2.0, ByteDance's flagship video model, was released on 10 February 2026. It went viral following the release of Hollywood actor deepfakes and photorealistic fighting scenes. The model held the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena for most of Q1, before HappyHorse was released.
Capabilities. Seedance 2.0 can generate videos from text, images, other videos, and also accepts audio. You can attach up to 12 files at the same time. Mention files with @ to reference each input in the prompt. The model also generates native audio (dialogue, ambient sound, Foley) in the same pass as video, and supports multi-shot narratives from a single prompt.
Of everything on this list, Seedance 2.0 is the most direct upgrade path for anyone who liked Sora 2's cinematic output and wants more resolution and more control. At 2K (2048×1080) it beats Sora 2's 1080p ceiling, and the 15-second max duration matches or exceeds most competitors.
Generation time: ~60 seconds for standard clip; up to 10 minutes for full 15s with multi-reference
3. Kling O3
What is is it. Kling 3.0 is the flagship video model from Kuaishou, launched on February 4, 2026 and built around what the company calls the Omni One architecture — a unified multimodal framework that generates video, audio, and images in a single pass. It held the top spot on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard until the release of Seedance 2.0. Many users prase Kling 03 for cinematic output.
Capabilities. Native 4K generation at up to to 60 frames per second, multi-shot generation with up to 6 camera cuts within a single 15-second clip, and Kuaishou's physics engine are worth a highlight. Users also praise the native audio generation, with lip-sync across 5+ languages.
Kling 3.0 Specs
Max resolution: 4K
Max duration: 15s
Native audio: Yes
Multi-shot: Yes
Generation time: ~2 minutes for 5s clip; 5+ minutes for 15s multi-shot
What is it. Grok Imagine Video is xAI's first video-generation model released in August 2025. It was updated to version 1.0 on February 3, 2026. The model runs on xAI's Aurora autoregressive engine and was trained across 110,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs — one of the largest training clusters in AI video. Its standout feature is fast generation: it takes roughly 30 seconds per video, and the quality stays genuinely impressive.
Capabilities. Grok’s max resolution is 720p and it generates videos with native audio in a single pass, and allows first-frame image inputs to chain multiple videos together. xAI's "freedom of expression" also means that Grok refuses fewer prompts than any other model on this list.
Sora 2 is being discontinued by OpenAI and the final support will end in September 2026. That’s a loss for anyone who genuinely enjoyed using it. We’ve covered the best Sora 2 alternatives currently on the market — each of these models offers higher quality generation and even more powerful features.
Key Takeaways
Sora is being fully discontinued. The official OpenAI Sora 2 app will stop working on 26 April 2026. Support for Sora 2 on other platforms, including ours, will end on 24 September 2026.
The shutdown is an economic decision. Sora was costing OpenAI roughly $1 million a day to run, with lifetime in-app revenue of only $2.1 million and a user base that had dropped below 500,000.
More powerful models are already on the market. HappyHorse 1.0, Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0, and Grok Imagine Video all beat Sora 2 on at least one of resolution, leaderboard ranking, speed, or price.
If you’re an official Sora 2 app user, export your content before 26 April 2026. After that date, user data will be permanently deleted.
On Overchat AI, support for Sora 2 will continue through September 2026, so users will still be able to generate content with it even after the official app shuts down.
