Ask HN: What are the best AI video generator online? Both free and paid

I'm not aware of any SoTA outside of Veo and Sora. I've found the two of them mostly comparable for one-off use cases. Veo3 might be a bit "crisper" in some uses but this is anecdotal...I'd also be curious if anyone else has a similar experience.

A few I’ve personally tested:

Runway ML (paid) – polished, great for text-to-video and editing.

Pika Labs (free beta, paid tiers) – strong on cinematic text-to-video.

Synthesia (paid) – best for business/explainer avatar-style videos.

Kaiber AI (free trial + paid) – very creative/artistic results.

Stable Video Diffusion (open-source) – still experimental, but promising.

For free tinkering, Pika and Kaiber are fun. For professional use, Runway or Synthesia is worth the investment. Would love to hear what others are using in production.