HunyuanVideo 1.5 vs Hy4 preview: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of HunyuanVideo 1.5 and Hy4 preview — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
HunyuanVideo 1.5
Tencent
Lightweight video foundation model from Tencent for high-quality text-to-video and image-to-video generation with strong motion consistency.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Generates coherent short videos directly from text prompts, optimizing visual fidelity and motion continuity to produce usable outputs for creative and prototyping workflows.
- Image-to-Video (I2V): Converts a single image or set of images into temporally consistent motion/video sequences while preserving appearance and improving frame-to-frame coherence.
- Efficient, Lightweight Architecture: Designed for efficiency (reported ~13B parameters in third-party sources) to reduce inference cost and enable faster generation compared with larger closed-source models.
- Image-Video Joint Training: Trained with a joint image-video strategy and curated datasets to improve spatial detail and temporal dynamics, yielding better motion consistency and fewer artifacts.
- Open-Source Release & Checkpoints: Official repository provides code, pretrained checkpoints, scripts, and examples to run, fine-tune, and extend the model for research and production use.
- Model Variants & Extensions: Provides specialized variants (HunyuanVideo-Avatar for audio-driven human animation, HunyuanVideo-I2V for image-to-video, HunyuanCustom for customization) to cover diverse generation needs.
- Text-to-video generation
- Image-to-video generation (I2V)
- High visual quality with temporal/motion consistency
- Lightweight design optimized for efficient inference
- Image-video joint model training approach
- Curated data pipelines and scaling strategies for robust training
- Open-source release with model checkpoints (ckpts) and training/inference scripts
- Gradio demo server included for interactive local/hosted demos
- Ecosystem models: Avatar (audio-driven human animation) and Custom multimodal extensions
Best for
- Short-form Content Creation: Rapid generation of visually coherent short videos from marketing copy or creative prompts for social media and ad prototypes.
- Animated Still Conversion: Transforming product photos, artwork, or character portraits into short motion clips using image-to-video capabilities for dynamic presentation.
- Audio-driven Human Animation: Using the HunyuanVideo-Avatar variant to produce lip-synced and motion-consistent human animations from audio tracks for virtual avatars or demos.
- Custom Branded Video Generation: Adapting HunyuanCustom to build branded or domain-specific video generators that follow style and content constraints for enterprise use.
- Research and Benchmarking: Open-source model and checkpoints enable academic and industry researchers to evaluate, compare, and improve video generation techniques.
- Prototype Visual Effects and Storyboarding: Quickly produce animatics or VFX concept clips from textual descriptions to iterate on scene composition and motion before full production.
- Content production and short-form video generation from text prompts
- Image-to-video animations and motion augmentation of still images
- Audio-driven avatar and human animation (via HunyuanVideo-Avatar)
- Rapid prototyping of video concepts and previsualization for film/ads
- Customized multimodal video generation and domain-specific model adaptation
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.