Hy4 preview vs Runway: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Runway — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Hy4 preview

Tencent

Free

Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.

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.

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.

Freemium

A cloud platform for generating and editing images and video with text, image, and video-based generative tools.

Text-to-Video Generation: Convert text prompts into short video clips using generative video models, enabling rapid concepting and visual storyboarding.
Image-to-Video and Image Generation: Produce new images from prompts and transform still images into animated sequences or stylized moving visuals.
Video Editing & Inpainting: Edit existing footage with tools for object removal, inpainting, and patch-based fixes that integrate generative fills directly on the timeline.
Background Removal & Green Screen: Replace or remove backgrounds from footage automatically to accelerate compositing and scene changes.
Model Library & Presets: Access a curated set of pretrained generative models and style presets to achieve different looks without model training.
Cloud Rendering & Export: Render high-resolution outputs in the cloud and export completed assets in common video and image formats for downstream workflows.
Collaboration & Project Sharing: Share projects, assets, and edits across teams to enable iterative review and collaborative content production.
API & Integrations: Programmatic access and integrations to incorporate generation and editing capabilities into external pipelines and tools.
Text-to-Video generation
Image-to-Video generation
Text-to-Image generation
Model-driven video and image editing workflows
Multimodal generation (text + images)
Scalable generation tools trusted by a large user base

Marketing Video Production: Rapidly prototype and produce short promotional videos from copy and briefs without full film shoots.
Social Content Creation: Generate native-format short videos and stylized images for social channels with minimal manual editing.
Concept Visualization and Previz: Turn written concepts or story beats into quick animated previews for creative review and iteration.
Post-Production Cleanup: Remove unwanted objects, replace backgrounds, and inpaint damaged frames in existing footage to save VFX time.
Design and Motion Graphics: Create animated assets, transitions, and stylized backgrounds for use in larger motion-graphics projects.
Rapid Prototyping for Creators: Experiment with novel visual styles, test variations, and iterate on creative ideas using model presets and quick renders.
Generating short video clips from text prompts for social or marketing content
Turning static images into animated video sequences
Rapid prototyping of visual concepts for design and advertising
Augmenting video editing pipelines with AI-assisted generation and effects
Creating visual assets for storytelling, film previsualization, and concept art