Best Sora alternative, 11 compared: Wan 3.0 tops the video arena at 7.3 cents a second, Veo 3.1 Lite costs 2.5 cents

What is the best Sora alternative now that Sora is closed?

Wan 3.0 on Pika is the best Sora alternative for the money. But what a model costs is a poor guide to how good it is. The dearest second of video in our table, 37.8 cents for Seedance 2.0 at 1080p on Luma Plus, buys a model ranked 7th on Artificial Analysis's text to video arena. The arena leader costs about a fifth of that. Across eleven replacements priced on 3 October 2026 the spread is 15x. The Seedance family alone runs from 27.1 to 69.6 cents a second, depending on which app sells it.

Each dot is one model inside one app, priced on that vendor's cheapest paid plan in US dollars: plan price, divided by the plan's credits, times the credits a clip costs, divided by the clip's seconds. The Elo is Artificial Analysis's, and it's built from pairwise human votes on clips that have audio. Runway Gen-4.5 and Luma Ray3.2 are absent from the arena's default list on 3 October 2026, so they're priced in the table below and left off the chart. The cost is what the plan charges, not what a finished clip costs you. Every retake spends the same credits again.

Sora itself is gone. OpenAI's help center states that "The Sora web and app experiences were discontinued on April 26, 2026", and the Sora API followed on September 24, 2026. ChatGPT plans no longer include video at any price, which is why the Google AI Pro vs ChatGPT Plus comparison now turns on that row.

Here's the pick by job, from the table and the arena on the same date:

• Best quality per dollar: Wan 3.0 on Pika Starter, $10 a month, 7.3 cents a second.
• Free, every day: Veo 3.1 in Google Flow, 50 credits a day on any Google account, though Google says free accounts may not get video at peak hours, roughly 2 PM to 5 PM UTC.
• Next best quality: Seedance 2.5 (1143 Elo, 3rd) on Pika, or MiniMax H3 (1138, 4th) on Hailuo from $9.99 a month.
• Cheapest paid entry: Kling Standard, $6.99 for the first month and $8.80 after, about 21 cents a 720p video in the first month and 27 cents at the renewal price.
• A presenter talking to camera rather than a generated scene: HeyGen, Creator plan $29 a month for 600 credits; it is an avatar tool, not a Sora replacement for scenes.

How much does each Sora alternative cost per clip?

A Sora alternative costs between 20 cents and $2 a clip on its cheapest paid plan, as of 3 October 2026. The clips differ in length, so the per second column is the one to compare. Every price below was read on the vendor's own pricing or help page that day, in US dollars, monthly billing unless stated.

Three things in the table are missing from all of the roundups on page one. First, the app matters as much as the model. Seedance costs 27.1 cents a second as 2.5 on Pika and 37.8 cents as 2.0 at 1080p on Luma. Runway's pricing page sells Seedance 2.0 Fast at 29 credits a second, 69.6 cents on its Standard plan. Second, Google charges its own subscribers half its developer price. The Gemini API pricing page lists Veo 3.1 Lite at $0.05 a second at 720p, $0.40 for 8 seconds. The same clip in Flow costs 10 of Google AI Pro's 1,000 monthly credits, $0.20. Third, Kling's $6.99 is an introductory price: its own credit guide (28 July 2026) marks it "first-subscription discount only" and names $8.80 as the renewal.

Credits don't carry over on most of these plans. Google's Flow help page says unused daily credits don't roll over, and monthly subscription credits don't roll into the next billing cycle. Buy the plan for the month you'll use, not the month you might.

Is there a free Sora alternative?

Yes. Google Flow is the free Sora alternative, because it gives every Google account 50 credits a day "with or without a subscription". At 10 credits a Veo 3.1 Lite clip, that's five clips of up to 8 seconds a day, or two Fast clips at 20 credits each. The help page adds a catch: "During peak hours, roughly 2 PM to 5 PM UTC, you may not be able to generate videos without a subscription." So plan your free clips outside that window. The daily refresh starts from your first generation, and a day you don't use is lost.

Nothing else in the table gives a recurring free allowance as of 3 October 2026. Runway's Free plan is 125 one time credits, which is two Gen-4.5 clips at 60 credits each. Pika's Free plan has 0 credits a month, and it only sells packs. Kling's credit guide lists its Basic plan with "No monthly Credits". Luma's pricing page doesn't list a free plan at all. The one fully free route is open weights on your own machine. That's the next section.

Is there an open source Sora alternative?

Wan 2.2 is the open source Sora alternative to run yourself. Alibaba's Wan team publishes it on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use, with text to video at 480p and 720p. The repository says its smallest model, TI2V-5B, "can run on a GPU with at least 24GB VRAM (e.g, RTX 4090 GPU)" and makes 720p at 24 frames a second. The 14B models need 80GB.

There are two cautions before you buy a GPU for it. The arena leader, Wan 3.0, is a newer model than the one on GitHub. The Wan-Video account lists no Wan 3.0 repository on 3 October 2026, so the free download is a generation behind what Pika sells for $10. And "without restrictions", the autocomplete phrase, only goes as far as the hosting. Every hosted app above runs your prompt on the vendor's servers under its terms. Open weights on your own card put the filter in your hands and leave the law on likeness and copyright where it always was.

If you used Sora for still images rather than video, the AI image generator guide covers that job. ChatGPT plans still include image generation.

Whizi makes video only on Powerhouse, and loses this comparison on entry price and choice

Whizi, which publishes this page, has one video model, Whizi Video AI, and it runs only on the Powerhouse plan at $49.99 a month, or $34.99 a month billed yearly. Each video job spends 20 of Powerhouse's 10,000 monthly credits. It loses this comparison on entry price, since $49.99 is above every plan in the table. It loses on choice too: it has one model against Pika's, Luma's and Runway's menus, no arena entry, and no per second price to compare. If video is the main job, you should buy Pika Starter for Wan 3.0 or use Flow for free. Powerhouse makes sense only if you'd pay for the chat side anyway: 280+ models including Claude and GPT, 500 image generations a month, and video in the same app. The first week on Powerhouse is $4.99.