The best AI video generation models in 2026, ranked

Seedance 2.0 Pro is the best AI video model you can actually call through an API right now. It holds Elo 1271 on Infer's leaderboard (Artificial Analysis Video Arena snapshot, 2026-04-30), generates native audio in the same pass as the picture, and costs $0.13 per second of output. Kling 3.0 Pro (1248 Elo) is the runner-up, with better resolution and camera control but no audio. Hailuo 02 Pro is the budget pick at $0.08/second when you're iterating on volume rather than shipping a hero spot. One model scores higher than all of them: HappyHorse-1.0/1.1 at 1368 Elo. It's ranked fourth here because a score you can't reliably call through an API isn't a buying recommendation yet.

The ranked list

Rankings below combine Infer's leaderboard Elo (Artificial Analysis Video Arena, snapshot 2026-04-30, via tryinfer.com/leaderboards), Infer's per-model pricing, and each model's documented feature set, resolution, audio pipeline, and camera controls, cross-checked against Infer's own model pages and each provider's documentation. Where a model isn't hosted on Infer, its rank reflects the same Elo table with no CTA attached.

See /guides/state-of-ai-video-2026 for how the underlying leaderboards themselves disagree with each other.

Seedance 2.0 Pro: the all-rounder

Seedance 2.0 Pro is the top hosted model on Infer's video leaderboard at 1271 Elo (Artificial Analysis snapshot, 2026-04-30). The reason isn't resolution; it ships at 720p, lower than Kling's 1080p output. It's audio. Seedance generates video and sound in one pass rather than stitching a separate audio model on afterward, with what ByteDance and Infer both describe as phoneme-level lip-sync, precise enough on paper to avoid the slight drift that shows up when audio is stitched onto video after the fact. Seedance also carries Infer's most granular camera language: orbit, dolly, crane, and static shots, plus explicit lighting-direction and shadow-density controls. That's director-level vocabulary most competing APIs don't expose.

The catch is resolution. 720p is fine for social and UGC-style ads, thin for anything bound for a TV or theater screen. That's Kling's lane, not Seedance's. Pricing sits at $0.13 per second of output, which Infer says matches ByteDance's own direct API rate, so there's no markup for going through Infer beyond the convenience of one key across every model on this list. A 10-second clip runs $1.30. Reference-image support (up to 5 images) landed on Seedance via Infer's changelog on 2026-07-20, alongside the same feature for Kling. Worth knowing if you're locking a character's look across multiple shots.

Run Seedance 2.0 Pro on Infer →

Kling 3.0 1080p Pro: the resolution and camera-control pick

Kling 3.0 Pro is the runner-up at 1248 Elo (Infer's Artificial Analysis snapshot, 2026-04-30), and it earns second place on the two things Seedance doesn't do as well: resolution and stylized motion. It natively captures at 4K and ships output at 1080p, a real step up for anything a client will view on a monitor larger than a phone. Infer's own copy calls it "Top 1" for camera control and "best in class" for stylized motion, the kind of claim that matters most on tracking shots and spin sequences, where cheaper models tend to smear moving limbs.

The flaw is audio, or the lack of it. This version of Kling 3.0 Pro has no native sound generation, so anything with dialogue or a synced beat needs a separate audio pass or a different model entirely. At $0.10 per second, a 10-second clip costs $1.00, cheaper than Seedance despite the higher resolution. That's the one place price and quality don't trade off against each other on this list. Reference images (up to 5) shipped for Kling in the same 2026-07-20 changelog entry as Seedance.

Run Kling 3.0 Pro on Infer →

Veo 3.1 Fast: the pick when audio is non-negotiable

Veo 3.1 Fast is third at 1208 Elo (2026-04-30 snapshot) and it's the only model in the top three built around native synchronized audio as its core feature rather than an add-on: Google's own SynthID-Audio watermarking runs on every clip. Clips cap at 8 seconds natively but chain to roughly 148 seconds, which matters for anything longer than a single shot. Infer's own model page calls Veo "best in catalog" for Foley and ambient sound, the only model on this list whose audio pipeline is built around environmental sound as a core feature rather than dialogue alone.

The honest weakness: a visible Google watermark burns into every export, on top of the inaudible SynthID tag. That's a real consideration for ad creative headed to a client deck. Vertical and square aspect ratios also add roughly 10 to 15% latency versus 16:9. Pricing on Infer runs $0.09 to $0.10 per second, so a 10-second clip lands around $0.90 to $1.00, competitive with Kling despite the audio Kling doesn't have.

Veo 3.1 Fast is live on Infer — try it →

HappyHorse-1.0/1.1: the highest score you (mostly) can't use yet

HappyHorse tops Infer's own leaderboard at 1368 Elo, a full 97 points clear of Seedance, and it's ranked fourth here anyway. Infer's leaderboard page flagged HappyHorse as an "anonymous top arena entry" with Alibaba-confirmed authorship and no public API at the time of that 2026-04-30 snapshot. Infer's changelog then shows HappyHorse 1.1 launching in Infer's own catalog on 2026-07-03, replacing HappyHorse 1.0, with 1080p output added on 2026-07-13. That's a real access improvement, but it's recent enough, and thinly enough documented outside Infer's own changelog, that we're not attaching a CTA or a rate card to it yet. Treat the top Elo score as a preview of where the frontier is heading, not a settled recommendation.

Hailuo 02 Pro: the value pick

Hailuo 02 Pro is MiniMax's value-tier model, and at $0.08 per second it's the cheapest model on this list with a stated Infer rate. Infer's own meta description puts it at "~50% cheaper than Kling and Veo." A 10-second clip costs $0.80. There's a second tradeoff beyond quality: Infer's hosted page for Hailuo 02 Pro returned a server error during our research pass, so its resolution and duration specs here come from MiniMax's own documentation (1080p on the Pro tier, up to 10 seconds per generation) rather than Infer's page directly. Qualify any claim about this model's Infer-specific behavior until that page is back up.

Try Hailuo 02 Pro in the Infer playground →

Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B: the open-weights pick

Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B is Alibaba's 14B-parameter model, Apache 2.0-licensed and free to self-host, fine-tune, or run on-prem: a different kind of value proposition than Hailuo's low per-second rate. Infer hosts it too, at $0.13 per second for teams that don't want to manage GPUs, and Infer's own comparative claim puts it at "~85% quality compared to Hailuo 02 Pro." Don't confuse this with Alibaba's frontier. The company's newer Wan 2.6 and Wan 2.7 releases (1080p at 24fps, up to 15 seconds, native audio-visual lip-sync) sit well ahead of the 2.2 generation Infer hosts, per Alibaba's own press materials. The T2V-A14B tag is specific: this is the text-to-video variant, not Wan's newer audio-native family.

Run Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B on Infer →

Runway Gen-4.5 and LTX-2.3: honest mentions, no CTA

Runway Gen-4.5 (1216 Elo on Infer's snapshot) isn't hosted on Infer, so there's no CTA here. Worth knowing anyway: Runway's own announcement claims 1247 Elo and "first" place on unspecified "global text-to-video leaderboards," a gap between self-reported and third-party-measured scores worth remembering any time a vendor quotes its own number. Its unified dialogue, ambient, and music generation, per Runway's research post, is a genuinely different architecture from Veo's or Seedance's audio approach.

LTX-2.3 Fast (1121 Elo) is Lightricks' open-weights entry, also not on Infer. It's the one to watch if open weights with native audio matter to you. LTX-2, its predecessor, was marketed as the first production-ready model with truly open audio-and-video weights, and LTX-2.3 refines sharpness and portrait handling on top of that base.

How we ranked

Rank combines three inputs, in this order: Infer's leaderboard Elo (Artificial Analysis Video Arena, snapshot dated 2026-04-30; see /guides/state-of-ai-video-2026 for why that date matters), Infer's per-model pricing, and each model's documented feature set, audio pipeline, camera control, resolution, checked against Infer's own pages and each provider's documentation. Infer hosts all of these models and profits equally whichever wins, so this list is just what the data says, including where a model Infer hosts loses to one it doesn't. Elo alone would put HappyHorse first. Access and documentation depth are why it isn't.

Which model for which job

• Talking-head ads and anything with lip-sync: Seedance 2.0 Pro.
• Brand spots headed to a big screen: Kling 3.0 Pro.
• Dialogue-driven or ambient-sound scenes: Veo 3.1 Fast.
• High-volume A/B testing of ad variants: Hailuo 02 Pro, for the lowest per-second cost.
• Self-hosting, fine-tuning, or on-prem requirements: Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B.
• Tracking the frontier before it's fully available: watch HappyHorse-1.1's access rollout.

Seedance, Kling, Veo, Hailuo, and Wan all run through one Infer API key, so switching between them for a test is a model-name change, not a new integration. All 5 of these video models run on one Infer API key →

What didn't make the list

Sora 2 isn't here because it's on its way out. OpenAI announced discontinuation on 2026-03-24, closed the consumer app on 2026-04-26, and the API sunsets 2026-09-24. Press reporting attributes the decision to unsustainable compute costs and declining usage (apiyi's shutdown coverage). If you're still on Sora 2, see /guides/sora-2-alternatives for the migration path.

grok-imagine-video scores a respectable 1231 Elo on Infer's snapshot, ahead of Veo 3.1 Fast, but access constraints kept it too thin on independently verifiable specs for this ranking, so we're not putting a number-3 model behind an asterisk we can't back up.

Vidu Q3 Pro (1221 Elo) is a capable mid-table entry but isn't hosted on Infer and didn't come with enough independently verifiable spec detail to give it a fair section here rather than a guess.

Frequently asked questions

What's the best AI video model overall right now? Seedance 2.0 Pro, as of July 2026. Elo 1271 on Infer's leaderboard (2026-04-30 snapshot) among models with a working public API, plus native audio in the same generation pass.

What's the best AI video model with audio? Seedance 2.0 Pro for lip-synced dialogue and Foley. Veo 3.1 Fast specifically for ambient sound design and ad-length dialogue clips.

What's the best free or open-source AI video model? Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B: Apache 2.0, self-hostable, and also available on Infer at $0.13/second if you'd rather skip the GPU management.

How much does AI video generation cost per second on Infer? $0.08 (Hailuo 02 Pro) to $0.13 (Wan 2.2, Seedance 2.0 Pro), with Kling 3.0 Pro and Veo 3.1 Fast at $0.09 to $0.10.

Why isn't HappyHorse, the #1 model on the leaderboard, ranked #1 on this list? Its 1368 Elo score came with a no-public-API flag on the same leaderboard snapshot. Infer's changelog shows it entering Infer's own catalog on 2026-07-03, but that's too recent and too thin on outside documentation to rank ahead of models with a year of production use behind them.

Can any of these turn a single still image into a video? Kling 3.0 Pro and Seedance 2.0 Pro both do, plus Hailuo 02 Pro per MiniMax's documentation. Wan 2.2 T2V-A14B is built text-to-video-first, so treat its image-to-video output as a secondary capability, not its strength.

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See also: the best AI models directory, best text-to-image models, best image-to-video models, best AI video models for ads, Kling 3.0 Pro vs Veo 3.1 Fast, Seedance 2.0 Pro vs Kling 3.0 Pro, the cheapest AI video APIs, the state of AI video, July 2026.