The best free AI video generators you can try out today

Haiper 1.5 was developed by a team of former Google DeepMind researchers and designed to compete with the likes of Sora and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha model. The AI generates either 2- or 4-second-long clips based on your input text, images, or even other videos, and takes around 2-3 minutes to produce once you get to the head of the generation queue.

It’s currently in beta release and is free to use, though as with most generative AI platforms, the free tier is highly restricted, which makes running multiple iterations of an idea a significant challenge. In this case, free users can create 10 videos per day, three videos concurrently, and receive 300 “credits.” Upgrading to the $8/month (billed annually) Explorer tier gains you unlimited creations per day, five concurrent generations, and 1,500 non-expiring credits per month, as well as the ability to download videos without watermarks and set their sharing status to private on Haiper’s platform. The $24/month Pro package offers all that plus unlimited total creations, 10 concurrent generations, and 5,000 non-expiring credits per month.

Pika 1.0

Pika is a free-to-use AI generation tool from the startup of the same name. It offers a suite of tools centering on its generative model that can create and edit videos in a variety of styles from anime to cinematic. The free AI video generator can create clips up to three seconds in length (24 fps), based on the user’s text and image inputs. Users can also edit existing videos, changing their overall style, adding effects or adjusting the in-frame content, as well as adjusting parameters like the aspect ratio.

Using Pika is not hard, though there is a bit of a learning curve, as there was with Haiper, if you want to create more than a basic three-second clip. You can either enter your prompt into the window or have Pika auto-suggest styles and subjects to try. Users can also add sound effects manually or have the platform insert them automatically. The generator will even lip sync spoken audio to the avatar on screen, expand the canvas, and focus in on specific regions of the generated video on subsequent iterations. If three-seconds isn’t long enough, users can add four-second increments to their video at the expense of credits.

I gave it the standard “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” prompt and waited the two minutes. The system returned not one but four potential video clips to review and further refine. Overall, the quality is roughly on par with Haiper, lots of visual hallucinations and artifacts including disappearing/reappearing dog tails and too many legs.

The free tier of Pika offers 250 initial credits to use for things like performing video generations and adding time to videos. Those credits refill to 30 daily once your initial stash run out and Lip Syncing audio costs 2 credits each. The $8/month Standard plan includes 700 credits that renew monthly (plus the option to purchase more at a discount), free lip syncing, the ability to download videos and upscale resolutions, do away with the watermark, and extend the video length.

For $28/month, you get Unlimited, with grants “Unlimited Chill generations,” 2,000 credits that renew monthly (and 30/day if those run out) as well as the benefits from the Standard tier. The $58/month Pro level pushes your generations to the front of the queue (aka “Lightning generations”) and gives you unlimited credits to play with.

Canva

Canva is a digital design platform that is as powerful as it is easy to use and able to create everything from business presentations and brand logos to social media graphics, videos, and GIFs. Users can create their projects based on the platforms templates and style suggestions or begin from a blank canvas, adding text, graphics, brand logos, uploaded images, and freehand drawn aspects to their work. Or they can activate the Magic Media feature, powered by Runway, and have the Canva AI generate images and video clips anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours in length.

Each generation request costs 1 credit and free-tier users only get 5 to start. The system is very stringent on what artistic styles it is allowed to use so “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” didn’t actually work as the system objected to both Ghibli and Spirited Away. Sans those terms, the AI took just a minute or two to return the horror above. More fine-tuning is definitely needed, though unlike some of the other apps discussed in this guide, Canva will allow you to download your video directly as an MP4.

Invideo AI

Invideo AI is the AI video generation tool from ElevenLabs, and is as simple and straightforward to use as Based Labs is complex. Users simply log in, select Create AI Video from the top of the screen, select between the Invideo 2.0 and 1.0 models, then enter their text prompt (up to 25,000 characters in length). Its creation process, however, is by far the slowest of those tested in this guide, requiring more than 10 real-world minutes of loading screen before prompting me to choose the audience, look and feel, and platform to put it on, then another 3-4 minutes to actually create the video.

That said, the resulting video is over a minute long, can be displayed in 480, 720, 1080, and 4K resolutions. The AI did also generously include both a voice over and music for the clip it created, despite having even less Ghibli influence than Based Labs.

Runway

Runway is an AI video generator based on the Gen model developed by company founders Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis. It offers a wide variety of AI tools including text and image to video, video-to-video editing, generative audio, and text-to-image tools. Users can generate clips in either five- or 10-second durations and at 720p resolution. Prompt engineering is an important skill to have here as well. The system is able to incorporate myriad storytelling aspects including the desired subject, scene, lighting, as well as camera movements and transitions. As with most generative AIs, the more detail and instruction you can include in the prompt, the more accurate the resulting content will be.