The Best AI Video Generators Now That Sora Is Gone

If you built a posting habit around Sora, the exit happened in stages. OpenAI told Axios on March 24 that it was shutting the video app down, and its help center says the Sora web and app experiences went dark on April 26, 2026. The API followed on Sept. 24. Axios reported the company was redirecting the compute toward what a spokesperson called “world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” and that its licensing deal with Disney ended with it.

So where do the people who made those clips go now? This list is for creators who want short, finished-looking video with as little friction as possible: social editors, small brands, filmmakers roughing out a shot. We haven’t run our own render tests. Quality calls lean on the published record, mainly the Artificial Analysis text-to-video arena, which ranks models with audio by blind human votes, plus the companies’ own spec pages. Rankings were checked on Oct. 1 and they move monthly, so treat the order of the list as a snapshot, not a verdict. Prices are in US dollars with Canadian dollars in brackets at roughly 1.39.

Before you pick one, read the commercial-use line. It differs more than the image quality does.

1. Wan 3.0: the arena leader, if you can get in

Alibaba’s Wan 3.0 sat first on the Artificial Analysis with-audio leaderboard when we checked, with an Elo of 1,159. It launched Aug. 24 with clips of up to 30 seconds in a single pass, output up to 1080p and synchronized multilingual voice, and it accepts unusual inputs, including PDFs and slide decks, as source material. Dataconomy reported pricing on Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio of US$0.05 (CA$0.07) a second at 480p up to US$0.20 (CA$0.28) a second at 1080p, which puts a full 30-second 1080p clip at about US$6 (CA$8.34).

The catch is access. At launch it required an application, and Alibaba broke from its open-weights habit: Wan 3.0 is closed. The easier door for most creators is through an app that resells it. Runway added Wan 3.0 for paid plans on Aug. 24, and OpenRouter lists it for developers.

2. MiniMax H3: 2K with sound, and a license worth reading twice

MiniMax’s H3 (the model behind the Hailuo app) ranked fourth in the same arena. According to Digital Applied, it generates 4 to 15 seconds at 2K with dialogue, ambience and music produced in the same pass, at US$0.13 (CA$0.18) a second through MiniMax’s pay-as-you-go API. A 15-second 2K clip costs US$1.95 (CA$2.71) before reference add-ons, and you can feed it up to 12 reference files, which is why ad shops like it for product work.

H3 also ships as open weights, and that is where it gets interesting for readers in Canada. Tech Times reported that the community license published Aug. 3 excludes the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea from local deployment, limits free use to organizations under US$20 million in annual revenue and requires commercial products to display “MiniMax H3” in their interface. Canada is not on the excluded list. Get a lawyer to read the license before you build a business on that.

3. Google Gemini Omni Flash: the one already on your phone

Google DeepMind’s Omni Flash, launched at I/O on May 20, is less a standalone app than a feature that shows up wherever Google lets you make things: the Gemini app, Flow, YouTube Shorts and, for free, YouTube Create. Its pitch is conversational editing. You combine text, images, audio and video, then ask for changes. The Next Web reported that Flash-tier clips were capped at 10 seconds at launch, and every output carries Google’s invisible SynthID watermark, which anyone can check through Gemini.

Version 1.1 ranked sixth in the arena. For heavier use, Google’s AI plans run from Plus at US$4.99 (CA$6.94) a month to Pro at US$19.99 (CA$27.79) and Ultra from US$99.99 (CA$138.99), with Flow credits scaling at each tier. If your audience lives on Shorts, this is the shortest path from idea to upload.

4. Kling: know which version you are actually getting

Kling’s marketing runs ahead of its availability right now, so read the fine print. Tech Times laid out the split on Sept. 30. Kling 4.0 Flash is in closed beta for Ultra Yearly subscribers only, making 3- to 20-second clips at 720p in standard 8-bit color. The headline features of Kling 4.0 Full are 30-second clips, 4K with 10-bit HDR and stereo audio with better lip-sync, and they are promised for October. No API pricing had been announced for either version.

What everyone can use today is Kling 3.0, released in February. It ranks 14th and 15th in the arena in its two Pro configurations, behind the newer Chinese models but with a production track record: Tech Times notes it has been used on Amazon Prime’s The House of David. Paid Runway subscribers can also reach Kling 3.0 models through Runway’s MCP connector.

5. Runway: the editor’s choice, now inside your editor

Runway’s own Gen-4.5 isn’t near the top of the with-audio arena, and that misses why people pay for it. Runway has become a hub: one subscription gets you Gen-4.5, Aleph 2.0, ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Wan 3.0, with Kling models available through its MCP connector. And it now lives where editors work. A Runway panel runs inside Premiere Pro and After Effects on all paid plans, so you can generate, restyle footage or upscale without leaving the timeline, and a DaVinci Resolve plugin arrived on Sept. 23.

The numbers: Gen-4.5 makes 2- to 10-second clips at 720p for 12 credits a second. The Standard plan costs US$12 (CA$16.68) a month billed annually or US$15 (CA$20.85) month to month, for 625 credits. Do the division and that is about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 a month, so anyone working seriously ends up on Pro at US$28 (CA$38.92) or Max at US$76 (CA$105.64). Runway’s help center is unambiguous on rights: “the content you create using Runway is yours to use without any non-commercial restrictions from us.” Paid plans drop the watermark.

6. Adobe Firefly: the cautious client’s pick

Firefly will not win a blind taste test against Wan or MiniMax. It wins the meeting with legal. Adobe’s plans page says “outputs from Adobe Firefly AI models are safe for commercial use,” and eligible enterprise customers can get IP indemnification for select outputs. That promise is about Adobe’s own models. Firefly also bundles partner models from Google and others, so check which model made the clip before you rely on it.

Pricing is built around five-second clips. Standard is US$9.99 (CA$13.89) a month for 2,000 credits, or up to 20 videos; Pro is US$19.99 (CA$27.79) for up to 40. Standard generation is 1K resolution, and 4K is reserved for the Premium tier.

7. Midjourney video: for animating stills you already love

Midjourney’s video tool is narrow and good at its job. You animate an image into a five-second clip, then extend it by four seconds at a time, up to 21 seconds. Output is 480p, or 720p HD on Standard and higher plans in Fast mode, and video eats GPU time much faster than images. An HD clip costs about seven minutes of fast time, against a Basic plan allowance of 200 minutes a month.

Plans run from Basic at US$10 (CA$13.90) to Mega at US$120 (CA$166.80). The commercial rule is specific: companies grossing more than US$1 million a year must be on Pro, at US$60 (CA$83.40), or Mega.

8. Higgsfield: everything at once, with a queue

Higgsfield is the aggregator most Sora refugees have heard of, largely because its marketing is everywhere. In its Sept. 29 milestone post, it listed Seedance 2.5 and 2.0, Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1, Wan 2.6, Grok Imagine 1.5 and Gemini Omni Flash among its models, and claimed nearly 1 million paying subscribers. Seedance 2.5, third in the arena, is the draw. It is hard to get at elsewhere in a consumer-friendly wrapper.

Read the terms before you buy an “unlimited” plan. WION reported that Higgsfield’s August unlimited offer ran on a shared queue limited to one job at a time, that customers reported waits of two hours or more against an advertised average under five minutes, and that refunds apply only within seven days of purchase if no credits were used. Our Higgsfield deep dive covers how the company got so big so fast.

One more thing before you publish anything made with these: if your clip has music or a cloned voice in it, our creator licensing guide covers what you can safely monetize. As for the most-hyped model on this list, Kling 4.0’s 4K, 10-bit HDR line was still marked “coming soon” on the last day of September.

Sources

• Axios: OpenAI to discontinue Sora video app
• OpenAI Help Center: What to know about the Sora discontinuation
• Artificial Analysis: Text-to-video leaderboard
• Dataconomy: Alibaba launches Wan3.0
• Digital Applied: MiniMax H3 launches
• Tech Times: MiniMax H3 open weights exclude US, EU, UK and Korea
• The Next Web: Google Gemini Omni Flash video model
• Tech Times: Kling 4.0 coming October
• Runway: Pricing
• Runway Help: Commercial use
• Adobe: Firefly plans
• Midjourney Docs: Video
• Higgsfield: $1B annualized revenue run rate
• WION: Higgsfield wait times