Compare tools
Polished vs Synthesia
An honest look at two different workflows—clips you assemble versus ads you ship from one conversation.
In short
Polished is for growth and paid social: hooks, pacing, placement-native ratios, and creative iteration in chat—not HR templates, L&D timelines, and internal-video politics. If your KPI is ads shipped, we did not build this for compliance training week.
Synthesia is where enterprises go for SSO, governance, training, translation, and internal comms at scale; a ton of companies run both.
What changes in your workflow
These are the decision factors we hear most from performance marketers—not a scorecard of every feature.
On models: Polished and products like Synthesia often sit on overlapping frontier video and image engines—you will see options such as Seedance 2 and other top-tier models behind both, not two unrelated stacks. The split is usually workflow: how shots get composed, iterated, and shipped as finished ads.
If you need a specific model in Polished and it is not listed yet, contact support—we expand the catalog as providers ship and we stay confident in quality.
Built for performance marketing ads+
Hooks, pacing, supers, and paid social ratios are first-class—less template fill-in for corporate decks, more ship-it creative for Meta, TikTok, and YouTube.
Iterate creative in chat+
You adjust tone, structure, and cuts in language—not only by revisiting template fields or re-rendering scenes.
Skip the “export and edit” handoff+
The agent composes a campaign-ready asset package instead of an avatar scene you finish in another tool.
Pick what matches your team
Synthesia tends to fit when…
- –Organizations standardizing on SSO, compliance, and SCORM-style workflows
- –Teams producing lots of internal-facing video
Polished tends to fit when…
- You want composed, platform-ready ads (copy, VO, captions, music, supers) without a CapCut or Premiere pass.
- You iterate creative by describing what feels wrong (“faster hook”, “warmer grade”, “stronger CTA”) instead of only regenerating new takes.
- You need one brief to produce multiple placement-native ratios—9:16, 1:1, 4:5, and 16:9—for paid social tests.
- You are okay with usage-based credits: you pay for the generation you use, with rollovers on subscriptions—similar in spirit to many AI stacks, but aimed at finished ads.
How pricing tends to feel
Pricing changes on every vendor’s site. Treat this as a planning snapshot and verify on their pages before you buy.
Polished
Credit-style usage
Free tier with credits (watermarked video on Free).
Paid tiers: Hobby about $20/mo, Standard $60/mo, Growth $200/mo—all include credits.
Credits map ~1:1 to underlying generation cost. Unused subscription credits roll over up to about 2× your monthly allowance; top-ups don’t expire. About $1 in credits for a typical finished ad.
Synthesia
Minute-based tiers
Free + minute tiers; Enterprise custom
Starting point: Starter around $29/mo (minute caps on published video)
Positioning and templates skew to L&D and internal video, not performance creative ops.
How we compare
We focus on workflow: assembly, iteration, and what lands in your ads account. We do not run hidden benchmarks or claim win-every-row feature tests. If your reality differs, both products are moving fast—judge with your own creative and your own numbers.
Questions when you are switching tools
We already pay for Synthesia enterprise—do we drop it?
Not necessarily. Many companies keep Synthesia for HR and training while using Polished for growth teams that need rapid paid social iteration without a video editor queue.
Does Polished use credits like other AI tools?
Yes. Credits track the cost of model and tooling usage. The difference is what you are buying: Polished targets finished ads from one agent thread, including composition and iteration—not only a single clip or still to fix elsewhere.
Do I have to cancel my current tool to try Polished?
No. Many teams keep a specialist generator for one job and use Polished when they want end-to-end ads. Start free and route a real brief through both workflows if you need proof.
Try Polished on a real brief
Sign up free, use your credits on one campaign-style ad, and see if the compose-and-iterate loop saves you time.