Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover ai video & voice and video editing. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Pictory | Runway | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $25 | From $15 |
| Pricing model | Free trial, then paid | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | 14 days | None |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Data export | Some of it | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Web | Web |
| Covers | AI Video & Voice, Captions & Subtitles, Video Editing | AI Video & Voice, Video Editing |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Turns a script or a blog post into a video
Pictory takes text, a script, an article, a webinar recording, and assembles a video from stock footage, captions and a synthetic voice. Nobody would call the result cinematic, and for a training clip or a summary of a post it is the difference between publishing and not. Plans are counted in video minutes a year, so the question is how much you intend to produce rather than which features you need.
Our note
The gap between the annual and monthly rates here is larger than usual, so committing for a year is most of the value proposition. Use the fourteen days on your actual source material rather than the samples, because the quality depends entirely on how well stock footage matches your subject.
Only on this side
Generative video with an editor around it
Runway is where the frontier video models arrive with a timeline attached, so a generated shot can be trimmed, upscaled and cut against footage you filmed. Credits are the unit of everything, and they go faster than the plan names suggest. Read the credit cost per second before picking a tier, because the gap between plans is nothing like the gap between prices.
Our note
Work out how many seconds of your chosen model each plan buys before subscribing, because the answer is usually smaller than the credit numbers suggest. Runway is the right pick when the shot cannot be filmed. For talking-head video from a script, Synthesia and HeyGen cost less and do it better.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.