Comparison
Four AI ad tools, and the one question that separates them
Most tools in this category hand you a clip. Lollipop hands you an ad. That is the distinction worth checking before price, because it decides whether you are buying footage you still have to assemble or a finished cut you can change. Below: what each tool is actually built on, read off its own pages, and where each one stops.
How were these facts checked?
Every fact about a competitor on these pages was read off that company’s own pricing page, help centre or developer documentation on 25 August 2026, and each one is recorded with the exact URL it came from.
No figure here comes from a third-party roundup. That sounds like pedantry and is not: several of the prices in wide circulation for these tools have no first-party source we could find, and one vendor’s own blog posts contradict each other about what its entry plan is called and what it costs.
The rule we applied to ourselves is that anything we could not fetch first-hand does not appear at all, in any form. It is not softened, it is not hedged, it is absent. That removed two vendors’ prices from this page, and the absence turned out to be more useful than the numbers would have been.
The only comparison that settles it is the one you run yourself.
Make an ad and compareEvery new account starts with 4,000 credits.
What is each one actually built on?
Creatify is built on a library of AI actors and a catalogue it advertises as more than 200 ad templates, rather than on generating footage for each shot.
Arcads sells a library of AI actors, and its homepage advertises more than a thousand of them. Arcads bills its talking actor at 800 credits a minute per actor. The unit a tool charges for tells you the unit it thinks in.
HeyGen is avatar-first in a stricter sense. All three of its video engines need an avatar identity plus a script or audio, so there is no model for generating arbitrary footage and no B-roll generation. HeyGen composes scenes around the avatar and documents a maximum of 50 scenes per video. So this is an avatar-centric pipeline rather than an absence of one.
Higgsfield is a different animal again. It sells an AI-native creative suite: a credit-metered subscription over a large set of generative media models, with a limit of up to 15 seconds per clip. Nothing about that is a failing. It is very good at the thing it is for, and the thing it is for is a shot.
| Tool | What it is built on | Is the price public? | Agent connector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lollipop | Generated footage, shot by shot | Published on the pricing page. | Yes, on every plan |
| Creatify | A library of AI actors, plus ad templates | Published on the pricing page. | Yes, on its top self-serve plan |
| Arcads | A library of AI actors | Not published anywhere on the site. | Yes, with an active subscription |
| Higgsfield | A metered suite of generative models | Its own pages disagree with each other. | Yes, at full credit price |
| HeyGen | Avatars and cloned digital twins | Published on the pricing page. | Yes, on every plan including free |
Which of them will tell you the price?
Two will, plainly. Creatify publishes two self-serve plans: Starter at $39 a month with 100 credits and 300 AI actors, and Pro at $99 a month with 300 credits and 1,500 AI actors.
HeyGen publishes a free plan of 3 videos a month, then Creator at $29 a month with 600 credits, Pro at $49 with 1,000 credits and Business at $149 with 1,500 credits.
Arcads publishes no price. Its pricing page returns a 404 on arcads.ai, on www.arcads.ai and on app.arcads.ai, and the site carries no pricing link in its navigation or its footer, so what Arcads costs is visible only after you sign up.
Higgsfield’s pricing page renders no plan information to a plain fetch, and four of Higgsfield’s own blog posts name its entry plan three different ways at three different prices. We are not going to guess which one is current.
For symmetry: Lollipop has two self-serve plans, Pro at $99 a month and Scale at $249 a month.
Does an agent connector separate them?
No, and it is worth saying so plainly on a page that would benefit from pretending otherwise. An agent connector is normal in this category rather than rare. Creatify, Arcads, Higgsfield and HeyGen all publish an MCP server, and HeyGen’s works on every plan including its free one.
What differs is what sits behind the connector. Pointing an assistant at a tool that makes clips gets you clips faster. The interesting question is whether the thing on the other end can carry a whole ad, and that is a question about the pipeline, not about the protocol. Both of our notes on what an assistant can and cannot do to an ad pipeline and the walkthrough of connecting one to Claude and briefing an ad take that view.
Where does Lollipop actually differ?
In one structural place. Picking a format in Lollipop is not filling in a template: each of the 21 formats ships its own scripting agent, its own scene agent and its own visual rules, and generation is bound by them. A claymation ad and a street interview are not the same pipeline with different art direction.
Underneath that, the footage is generated for the shot rather than drawn from a gallery of performers. Lollipop generates video through 24 different video models.
And there is a mundane one that matters more than it sounds. Ads render vertical (9:16), square (1:1) and widescreen (16:9). HeyGen documents its output as 16:9 or 9:16 only, with no square 1:1 and no 4:5, and locks video containing an avatar to 25 frames a second. If you buy placements that want a square, that is a hard stop rather than a preference.
Start with the library of ad formats and what each one is for if you want to see the range before the comparison.
The four pages under this one
- Creatify compared with Lollipop, for an actor library with a template catalogue and a paid agent tier.
- Arcads compared with Lollipop, for the tool that will not quote a price until you are inside it.
- Higgsfield compared with Lollipop, for the case where you want shots rather than a finished ad.
- HeyGen compared with Lollipop, for avatars, cloned twins and the placements they cannot fill.
What this page does not tell you
- Nobody ran these tools side by side. Everything here is read off published pages. A comparison of output quality would need the same brief given to five products and a jury, and that is a different piece of work than this one.
- Prices move, and two of these are unreadable today. Every figure carries the date it was fetched, and any of them may have changed by the time you read this. Check the vendor’s page before you decide anything on a number.
- We make one of the five. That is why the fact-checking rule on this page is stricter than it needs to be, and why the section above says an agent connector is not a differentiator when it would be easier to imply that it is.
What if the shortlist is not the question?
Then start from what you sell rather than from who sells the tool. Which formats suit an online store shipping physical products and what an ad generator is allowed to show of your software both work backwards from the buyer, and the second one exists because neither SaaS demo format will draw your product’s interface: the screen is only ever shown by playing your own recording, which is a constraint no comparison table has room for.
Brief one ad and judge it against whatever you are using.
Make an ad and compareDescribe the product in a chat. Lollipop writes the script, casts the actor and renders every shot, and you can open the canvas to change any of it.