Synthesia Review

How we rated Synthesia

Synthesia publishes its own plan list, and that list is where this review starts. The pricing page, the documentation on video creation and the help center articles on brand kits and workspace permissions are the whole basis for what follows. No clip was filmed here and no account was bought, so what the scores describe is the feature set Synthesia documents and the terms it publishes, not the experience of using them. Every source behind these figures, with the date each was checked, is listed at the end.

Avatar realism

The library scales with the plan: 9 stock avatars on the free tier, 125+ from Starter, 180+ from Creator and 240+ on Enterprise, with personal avatars arriving on Starter and a bespoke tier above that. The score comes from Synthesia’s published sample output, which is styled and lit consistently and holds together in the resolution its plans export. It stops at 4.6 because of what samples can show: those clips exist to sell the product, so they are the frames the company chose to publish, and none of them puts an avatar through an awkward sentence at speed.

Editor speed

Work here is template-led rather than timeline-led. A script goes into a template, an avatar and a voice are assigned, and the render is the last step, which keeps a first video quick and keeps a hundred of them consistent. The score stops at 4.4 on the workspace wrapped around that editor: the pieces that let a second person pick a clip up are the ones held back for the tier above, so an edit that involves anyone else turns into a hand-off. A tool this good at repetition should not need an email thread to land a change.

Language and voice coverage

Synthesia lists 160+ languages and voices from the free plan upward, and documents dubbing for 70+ languages on Basic rising to 140+ on Enterprise, with a one-click translation flow that re-voices a finished video without rebuilding it. Set that against HeyGen’s 175 paid-plan languages and the headline counts land close together. The difference that would matter is depth: how many distinct voices a single language carries, and whether they survive technical vocabulary. Neither pricing page settles that, so this is a tie at 4.6 rather than a win for either tool.

Team and brand controls

This is the criterion Synthesia wins, and the difference is in what each vendor documents rather than in the scores. Where HeyGen names a brand kit and a single-editor handoff, Synthesia names the machinery behind them: brand-kit enforcement that keeps unapproved fonts and colours out of a published video, a Brand Admin role to hold it, folder-level permissions deciding who may view, comment on or edit what, live collaboration, audit logs, and SCORM export into a training system. 4.8 credits that depth rather than the video that comes out the other end, which is where the two tools sit closest.

Price and value

Starter begins at $18/mo billed annually and Creator at $64/mo, and both sell a pool of credits rather than a number of videos, so the allowance has to be converted into minutes before it can be compared with anything. For one person turning out training clips the rate is fair. The value question is what the money unlocks: the enforcement and the seats that justify Synthesia over a cheaper generator all sit on Enterprise, and the tiers below it are priced per editor rather than per team. 4.4 pays for a strong single-editor tool whose team price is unknown until somebody asks for it.

Who Synthesia is for

Training, compliance and internal-comms teams that make video as a company, need it in more than one language, and have a person whose job is to approve it before it ships. It fits best where the same clip has to clear a legal or safety review. The comparison below sets out what HeyGen does differently for teams that need less of that layer and more speed.