Arcads vs HeyGen: which AI avatar tool is better for ads?

HeyGen is a general AI video company. Its homepage headline is "AI videos starring you, made in minutes," and its focus is your Personal Avatar: your face and voice without filming every video (heygen.com). Ads are one use among many, next to training, sales and translation.

Arcads is built only for ads. Its help center says it is for "performance marketers, e-commerce brands, app and game companies, service businesses, and agencies," and everything in it, from the actor library to competitor ad research, points at paid social (What is Arcads?).

So the question is less which is better and more whose face you want. If it's yours, HeyGen is designed around that. If it's a range of creator-style actors, Arcads is.

HeyGen's product placement app combines a product image with an avatar, generates four candidate images, then animates the chosen one with a script. Its help center says it is optimised for handheld or small products and that "larger items... may appear scaled down to fit naturally in the avatar's hand" (HeyGen product placement). The feature is on Creator and above.

Arcads offers an actor holding your product, unboxing POV, cinematic product shots from your image and static ads. Its help center notes that library actors aren't holding your product yet; you generate an image of an actor holding it first, then make it talk (Show a product in a video).

Both approaches put a generated person next to your product. advrt takes the opposite route: it edits your real product photo into lifestyle, UGC-style and headline scenes, with a prompt that tells the model not to change the product's shape, colours, label or logo. It can't make the person talk.

Arcads can. Its Mark agent can connect to Meta Ads, "read campaign performance, clone the winner and publish new ads" (Arcads performance marketing). We didn't find a description of how it structures a test or decides a winner.

HeyGen's ad pages say you can "download and upload them to your preferred ad platforms" (HeyGen AI video ads). Some tool pages mention tracking performance signals, but we didn't find a native Meta or TikTok publishing integration or ad analytics in its pricing table or help center.

advrt is built around the test. Each creative gets its own Meta ad set with an equal daily budget, and each is judged against your ad account's last 30 days, with purchases if the account has at least 10 in that window and click-through rate otherwise. Losers can pause automatically.

Both tools sell credits at different rates, so we converted each vendor's published rates into video per month. HeyGen charges per minute of finished video; Arcads charges per video for Arcads 1.0 and per started minute for its other talking models.

Short ads change the maths. A 20-second hook on Arcads 1.0 still costs a full 800 credits, the same as a 2-minute testimonial, while HeyGen bills by the minute of finished video. If you make many short hooks, HeyGen's per-minute pricing is easier to stretch. If you make fewer, longer videos with a range of actors, Arcads' per-video price works in your favour.

Neither number includes failed renders. In advrt's own showcase run, about 1 in 3 product videos needed a second render. Plan for some waste on any generative video tool.