We rank and test 9 of the best AI video generation models available right now. We ran each model on the same prompt and included the resulting clip.
While we're comparing the raw models themselves here, see our guide to the best AI video generation tools for the best places to use them.
Seedance 2.0 is still the best AI video generation model overall. In our experience it has excellent prompt following, the most dynamic camera work, and high-fidelity rendering that most other models — even ones that came after it — cannot match. You can use it today on the Overchat AI video generator.
AI video models have come a long way, and in 2026 it's highly advantageous that a modern video generation model includes these features:
The table below compares 9 of the best video generation models at a glance:
| Model | Developer | Max resolution | Clip length | Native audio | API price per second |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.0 | ByteDance | 1080p | 4–12 s | ✅ | $0.30 |
| Kling 3.0 | Kuaishou | 4K | 3–15 s | ✅ | $0.11 |
| Gemini Omni Flash | 720p | 10 s | ✅ | $0.10 | |
| Veo 3.1 | Google DeepMind | 4K | 8 s | ✅ | $0.40 |
| Grok Imagine 1.5 | xAI | 720p | 6–15 s | ✅ | $0.14 |
| HappyHorse 1.1 | Alibaba | 1080p | 15 s | ✅ | $0.14 |
| Wan 2.7 | Alibaba | 1080p | 2–15 s | ✅ | $0.10 |
| Hailuo 2.3 | MiniMax | 1080p | 6–10 s | ❌ | $0.05 |
| LTX 2.3 | Lightricks | 4K | 20 s | ✅ | $0.05 |
Every model in this table is available inside Overchat AI, so you can run the same prompt through several of them and compare the results yourself.
Now that we've taken a look at the lineup, let's talk about each model in more detail, as well as look at an example generation using a difficult prompt — an anime fight scene.
"Visual style: cinematic 3D-to-2D cel-shaded anime with extremely high model precision. Lighting details: emphasize strong backlighting and rim light. Use a cool teal tone as the primary color palette, accented by golden light or electric sparks generated during combat. Environmental particles: floating rubble, raindrops, and smoke dust must remain continuously present in the frame. Raindrops during high-speed action should appear as elongated linear motion blur. Physical characteristics: extremely strong impact feedback with screen shake, motion blur between actions, and impact frames at the moment of collision. From 0-1 seconds, open with a wide-angle silhouette standoff, with floating debris creating an oppressive mood; from 1-2 seconds, quickly cut to a sharp close-up of the short-haired boy's fierce eyes; from 2-3 seconds, shift to a close facial shot of the long-haired swordsman holding his blade with a cold expression; from 3-4 seconds, use a rapid zoom-in to deliver the visual impact of an explosive dash; from 4-5 seconds, show the sword-swing wind-up in a medium shot with strong streaking motion blur; from 5-6 seconds, use an overhead close-up of the long-haired swordsman's calm expression; from 6-7 seconds, reach the peak clash, captured in a wide-angle shot with sparks and shockwaves bursting outward; from 7-8 seconds, one fighter uses the force to leap into the air, creating a strong sense of spatial displacement; from 8-9 seconds, use a close-up of dual blades blocking, producing blue-white electric energy feedback; from 9-10 seconds, use intense camera shake to depict afterimage-like evasive movement; from 10-12 seconds, the two fighters rapidly cross paths on screen with consecutive cuts showing the shift between attack and defense; from 12-14 seconds, the camera rapidly circles around them during close-quarters combat, then freezes on the misaligned pose as they pass shoulder to shoulder, capes whipping violently, and the battle ends abruptly in extreme violent aesthetics."
Seedance 2.0 is ByteDance's flagship video model, released in April 2026. It supports up to 9 images, 3 video clips and 3 audio files as references, allowing you to generate consistent characters from scene to scene.
Seedance 2.0 held the #2 arena position behind Gemini Omni Flash as of July 2026, and before that was widely considered the best video generation model. Models like HappyHorse and Gemini Omni Flash have since overtaken it purely in the rankings, but we feel that in action scenes and physics it still creates more believable, richer images. Just take a look for yourself:
Our test clip: Seedance 2.0 mini, 14 seconds, 480p
The model generates 4–12-second clips at up to 1080p with audio, and it understands film-set camera language (dolly, pan, orbit, rack focus) well enough that you can control shots through prompting.
Price: $0.30/second at 720p or $0.68/second at 1080p; the mini tier costs $0.072–0.155/second. A five-second 720p clip is about $1.52, or $0.77 on mini.
Pros:
✅ Up to 9 image + 3 video + 3 audio references in one generation
✅ Strong cinematic camera control
✅ No visible watermark on outputs
Cons:
❌ The full-quality tier is one of the priciest on this list
❌ Clips cap at 12 seconds
Kling 3.0 is the video model by Kuaishou, released on February 4, 2026. It supports 4K videos at 60fps and can make up to 6 camera cuts in a single generation. It also supports native lip-sync in 5 languages and legible text rendered in-frame.
Have a look at our test scene:
Our test clip: Kling 3.0 o3 standard, 14 seconds, with audio
Isn't the choreography here really convincing, even compared to Seedance?
Also note that Kling models are well known for video-to-video editing. The o1 edit line changes an existing video rather than generating a new one (swapping a character, replacing clothing, aging a face), and it's the engine behind several tools in Overchat AI, including its face-swap and motion-control features. We've covered the model in depth in our Kling 3.0 review.
Price: $0.084–0.112/second on the standard tier and $0.112–0.14/second on pro, which puts a five-second clip with audio at $0.56–0.70; video-to-video edits cost $0.168/second.
Pros:
✅ 4K at 60fps, the highest output spec here
✅ Multi-shot scenes with up to 6 cuts per generation
✅ Video-to-video editing of existing footage
Cons:
❌ Per-mode price ranges make costs harder to predict
❌ Top specs sit behind the pro tier
Gemini Omni Flash is Google's multimodal video generation model, released on June 30, 2026, and the current #1 on both the text-to-video and image-to-video leaderboards of the Artificial Analysis arena. We'd have to argue with that ranking based on our testing.
Gemini Omni Flash generates 10-second clips with native audio from any mix of text, images, audio or video as input — a very powerful feature for creative control.
In our own test, though, its prompt adherence trailed Seedance and Kling, and animation quality was somewhat rubbery, which is why it sits third here despite leading the arena.
Our test clip: Gemini Omni Flash, 10 seconds, 720p
However, perhaps that's not the best clip to test the model on, as its biggest feature is conversational editing, where you can tell the model to change one thing in a finished clip and it applies the edit while keeping the rest of the frame intact.
Price: ~$0.10 per second of video through the Gemini API, so a 10-second clip costs about $1.00.
Pros:
✅ #1 Elo score in both arena leaderboards as of July 2026
✅ Conversational editing of finished clips
✅ Accepts text, image, audio and video input in one prompt
✅ Cheap for a frontier model at ~$0.10/second
Cons:
❌ 720p output only, with no 1080p or 4K tier
❌ Clips cap at 10 seconds
❌ No free tier in the API
Veo 3.1 is Google DeepMind's video model, released in October 2025. It's an old model, but it remains popular even today. Veo 3.1 can generate videos that are 4, 6 or 8 seconds long at up to 4K, and a scene-extension feature chains them into sequences of up to a minute.
When it comes to fidelity, however, you'll have to work around the limitations of an older model when using it. See the clip for yourself:
Our test clip: Veo 3.1 Lite, 8 seconds, 720p
Price: $0.40/second for the full model with audio ($2.00 for five seconds), $0.15/second for the fast tier, $0.05/second for Lite at 720p.
Pros:
✅ Up to 4K output, in both 16:9 and 9:16
✅ Scenes up to a minute via extension
✅ Reference images and first-last-frame control
Cons:
❌ A five-second clip on the full tier costs $2.00
❌ Single generations cap at 8 seconds
Grok Imagine 1.5 is xAI's video model that runs on Aurora, xAI's autoregressive engine, and generates 6–15-second clips at 720p with speech and sound effects.
The biggest advantage of Grok Imagine 1.5 is the sheer speed at which it generates videos — if you use the Fast variant you get a finished 6-second clip in about 25 seconds, versus several minutes for comparable models. This is faster than GPT Image 2 sometimes generates images. This makes it a great choice for iterating and testing prompts. Is it the highest fidelity model? Probably not, but you might disagree:
Our test clip: Grok Imagine, 14 seconds, 480p
Price: $0.08/second at 480p or $0.14/second at 720p, so a five-second 720p clip is $0.70; extending an existing video adds $0.01/second of input.
Pros:
✅ #1 in the image-to-video arena at launch
✅ ~25-second generation time on the Fast variant
✅ Can extend existing videos, including ones it didn't make
Cons:
❌ 720p maximum, with no 1080p tier
❌ Elo lead has been contested since Gemini Omni Flash launched
HappyHorse is a real dark horse in AI video (excuse the pun). It launched anonymously in April 2026, with many people speculating that it was a new generation of Sora or Seedance, instantly climbed to the top of the no-audio text-to-video arena with a roughly 115-point lead, and was later revealed by CNBC to be a project of Alibaba's Taotian group, the same people who worked on Kling. Version 1.1 was later released on June 23 with better motion and audio.
Technically it's a 15-billion-parameter model that processes video and audio tokens in a single transformer, which is why its lip-sync, covering 7 languages including sung vocals, is so strong. Clips run up to 15 seconds at 1080p with multi-shot sequencing.
Our test clip: HappyHorse 1.1, 14 seconds, 720p
Price: $0.14/second at 720p or $0.18/second at 1080p on fal.ai.
Pros:
✅ Lip-synced dialogue in 7 languages, including singing
✅ 15-second 1080p multi-shot clips
✅ Held #1 arena positions within weeks of an anonymous launch
Cons:
❌ No 4K tier
❌ Fewer control features than Veo or Seedance, with no reference-image system
Wan 2.7 is also an AI video model by Alibaba, built by the Tongyi lab. It has two variants: a hosted model that you can access through AI platforms like Overchat AI, and an open-weights model you can download and run on your own hardware. Released in April 2026, in terms of architecture it's a ~27-billion-parameter diffusion transformer.
Wan 2.7 is probably best known for its permissive safety filter — it will often generate scenes that other models refuse to create. It's also known for its Thinking Mode, where the model plans the scene before generating a frame, which shows up in noticeably better prompt adherence on complex scenes. Other notable features are legible on-screen text in 12 languages and up to 15-second clips at up to 1080p and 30fps with audio.
Our test clip: Wan 2.7, 14 seconds, 720p
Price: $0.10/second at 720p or $0.15/second at 1080p on fal.ai; the open-weights line is free to run locally.
Pros:
✅ Thinking Mode plans the scene before generating
✅ Open-weights line alongside the hosted API
✅ Renders readable in-frame text in 12 languages
Cons:
❌ No 4K tier
❌ Running it locally requires a serious GPU
Hailuo 2.3 is the video model of MiniMax, the Shanghai AI company. It's known for body-motion physics and anime-style output, and on both it holds its own against models that outrank it overall. Clips run 6 or 10 seconds at 768p, or 6 seconds at 1080p.
Our test clip: Hailuo 2.3 standard, 10 seconds, 768p, no audio
Note: Hailuo 2.3 doesn't generate audio.
Price: $0.28 per 6-second standard clip, $0.49 per pro clip, $0.19 on the fast tier.
Pros:
✅ Body-motion physics among the best in the arena
✅ Strong anime and stylized output
✅ Cheapest closed model here per clip
Cons:
❌ No native audio at all
❌ 1080p clips cap at 6 seconds
LTX 2.3 is a 22-billion-parameter open-source diffusion transformer video model that came out in 2026. It was developed by Lightricks, the Israeli company behind Facetune.
Specs are very impressive here: up to 4K at 50fps, clips up to 20 seconds, native 9:16 vertical output. When it comes to quality, well, see for yourself:
Our test clip: LTX 2.3 fast, 14 seconds, 1080p
Yeah, that's a bit of a mess.
LTX 2.3 ships as four checkpoints from a distilled fast variant to a pro tier, and the fp8 build runs on about 18 GB of VRAM — basically, you can generate videos on a high-end consumer GPU. This explains some of the temporal instability and glitchiness of the image; after all, there's no world in which you could run Seedance or Kling models at home, even on a very high-end PC. Still, perhaps leave this one for more static scenes.
Price: about $0.27 for a five-second 720p clip on fal.ai's per-megapixel billing; the weights are free to self-host.
Pros:
✅ Apache 2.0 license, free for commercial use
✅ 4K at 50fps and 20-second clips
✅ The only open model with native synchronized audio
Cons:
❌ Blind-vote scores still trail the closed frontier models
❌ Self-hosting needs ~18 GB of VRAM
If you're wondering what open-weights AI video model you can run on your own hardware, the choice comes down to these three: LTX 2.3, Wan 2.7 and Hunyuan Video 1.5.
You might also want to look into NVIDIA's Cosmos3-Super-Image2Video — it has a very high Elo score in the image-to-video (no audio) open-weights arena, though it's a research-oriented release.
What if you wanted to test every model we've talked about, but you don't want to pay for 5+ different AI subscriptions, and free tiers on their respective platforms are not enough?
We've got you covered. We've built Overchat AI video generation to provide access to the best video generation models in a single place, including all of the options we've reviewed here — and even more exciting models. What's more, when a new model is released, we typically add it to the product within a few days after it's officially out and available to AI platforms for integration.
If you had to pick just one — it's got to be Seedance 2.0. In all our testing, it always comes out as the most natural in the hardest scenes like action, close shots of faces, difficult animations and physics. And those are the scenarios where you need the best AI video models. All of the options above can render a static scene quite realistically, but with dynamic action even the best video generation models in 2026 sometimes struggle.
Quick answers to the most common questions about AI video generation models in 2026.
Seedance 2.0 is the best AI video generation model as of July 2026: when we ran the same combat-scene prompt through nine models, it matched the shot-by-shot brief most closely, with Kling 3.0 the runner-up on motion choreography. On the Artificial Analysis arena's blind-vote Elo, Gemini Omni Flash holds #1 with Seedance close behind, and the rankings have changed four times this year, so the gap between the top models is smaller than the positions suggest.
Every model in this ranking generates audio natively except Hailuo 2.3. Gemini Omni Flash, Veo 3.1 and Grok Imagine 1.5 produce dialogue and sound effects in the same pass as the video; Kling 3.0 and HappyHorse 1.1 add lip-sync in 5 and 7 languages respectively; LTX 2.3 is the only open-source model that does it in a single pass.
AI video generation through APIs costs between $0.05 and $0.40 per second of output in 2026, which puts a five-second 720p clip between roughly $0.27 with LTX 2.3 and $2.00 on Veo 3.1's full tier. Open-weights models like Wan 2.7 and LTX 2.3 are free to run if you have a GPU with about 18 GB of VRAM or more.
An AI video model is the engine: the neural network, like Seedance 2.0 or Veo 3.1, that turns a prompt into footage. An AI video generator is the app built on top of one or more of those engines, adding an interface, templates and editing around the raw model. This article ranks the engines; for the apps, see our guide to the best AI video generation tools.
OpenAI shut down the Sora social app on April 26, 2026, and has since retired the Sora 2 API, closing out the Sora line, which is why it doesn't appear in this ranking despite defining the category in 2025. If you came here looking for a replacement, see our guide to the best Sora 2 alternatives.
The longest single generation in 2026 is LTX 2.3 at 20 seconds, with most frontier models producing 10–15 seconds per pass. Scene-extension features push past that limit: Veo 3.1 chains generations into sequences of up to a minute, and Grok Imagine can extend any existing clip.
This article is based on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena, plus our own testing.
