Hy4 preview vs Seedance 2.0: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Seedance 2.0 — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
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.
Seedance 2.0
ByteDance
ByteDance Seedance 2.0 is a multimodal video-generation model for text→video and image→video with prompt controls and production templates.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Converts descriptive text prompts into short video clips with configurable seed, duration, aspect ratio and stylization parameters for controllable outputs.
- Image-to-Video Generation: Uses one or multiple images as input to produce animated video sequences that maintain visual consistency with input sources.
- Structured Prompt Syntax: Supports advanced prompt constructs (including @ reference syntax and camera-language directives) to control framing, camera movement, and scene composition.
- Production Templates and Cases: Provides ready-made templates and example prompts tailored for e-commerce ads, dramas, music videos, dance imitation, science education, and short-form marketing.
- Fine-grained Control Parameters: Exposes generation parameters (seed, resolution presets, aspect ratio options, duration limits and other model knobs) for reproducibility and iteration.
- Lip Sync and Motion Fidelity: Includes capabilities for aligning mouth movement and character motion to audio or lip-sync targets (documented in community guides and integrations).
- Partner/API Integration: Designed to be accessible via platform partners and APIs (documented partner routes such as Jimeng, Dreamina and planned global API partners) enabling service integration and automation.
- Prompt Authoring Tools and Agent Skills: Community tools and agent 'skills' (e.g., prompt-writing skillkits) exist to generate optimized prompts, templates, and camera/action specifications automatically.
- Official API (global release scheduled 2026-02-24) for programmatic Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video generation
- Multimodal inputs: natural language prompts + image references (support for @ reference syntax and camera language)
- Prompt controls: seed, aspect ratio, duration, camera parameters, scene/cut templates and structure patterns
- Lip-sync and audio-aware motion generation for videos with aligned speech/music
- Physics-aware motion and scene consistency for realistic movement
- Agent and automation support: documented integration patterns for Claude Code, Cursor, Cline and other agent frameworks; skills for automated prompt construction and storyboarding
- Multiple access routes: Jimeng (China, requires +86 phone), Doubao (HK IP required), Cyberbara global partner route (post-API launch)
- Third-party wrappers and community integrations: Cog wrappers, Gradio/HuggingFace Spaces demos, community API guides and scripts
- Typical constraints and defaults documented: example resolutions (e.g., 480p), default durations (example: 5s), and API key/environment variable usage patterns
- Availability notes: BytePlus access closed; Dreamina/CapCut global 2.0 not ready as of Feb 2026
Best for
- E-commerce Video Ads: Rapidly generate short promotional videos using product images plus tailored ad-style prompt templates and camera-language to highlight product features.
- Drama and Short-Film Previs: Create proof-of-concept scenes or storyboards for dramas using text prompts and image references to iterate camera blocking and mood quickly.
- Dance Imitation and Music Videos: Produce stylized dance sequences and AI-generated MVs by combining choreography prompts, reference clips/images, and lip-sync parameters.
- Educational Microvideos: Generate short science or educational clips with scripted narration and visual examples using structured prompt templates for clarity and pacing.
- Social Short-Form Content: Produce vertical or square short-form videos optimized for platforms (aspect ratio and duration control) to speed content production workflows.
- API-driven Automation: Integrate Seedance 2.0 into production pipelines or partner platforms (post-API rollout) to automate bulk video generation, A/B creative testing, or dynamic ad assembly.
- Short-form content production: ads, music videos (MVs), and social clips
- Drama and narrative scene generation for previsualization and production
- E-commerce product showcase videos and dynamic ads
- Dance imitation and choreography generation with motion fidelity
- Science education and explainer videos using multimodal prompts
- Automated storyboard and scene generation integrated with agents and MCP workflows