Which AI model should I use?
Start from what you are making — a still, a clip with sound, a talking head, a voice, a track or a mesh — then pick the family whose strengths match; each family's page lists what it is best for and what it costs.
Images
- Photoreal stills and products — Seedream 5.0 Pro, GPT Image 2.5, Nano Banana Pro.
- Posters, packaging and text in the picture — Grok Imagine Image 2.0 and Qwen-Image render typography reliably.
- Editing an existing photo — the edit rows of Nano Banana, Seedream, GPT Image, Qwen-Image and Wan; describe the change, not the whole picture.
Video
- Clip with dialogue and sound in one pass — Seedance 2.5, MiniMax H3, Wan 3.0, Gemini Omni 1.1, HappyHorse, Veo 3.1 (sound is a paid option there), FLUX 3 Video.
- Animating a photo — the image-to-video row of any of the above; the picture fixes the look, the prompt describes the motion.
- Keeping a character across shots — reference-to-video rows (Wan 3.0, MiniMax H3, Vidu Q3, Kling 3, Gemini Omni).
- Talking head from a photo and a voice — OmniHuman 1.5, VEED Fabric.
- Re-syncing lips in an existing video — sync lipsync v3, VEED lipsync.
Audio and 3D
- Text-to-speech — ElevenLabs v3, Gemini TTS, MiniMax Speech, Seed Audio.
- Music — MiniMax Music.
- 3D meshes — Hunyuan3D from an image or a prompt.
How to decide in practice
Open the family page, read the "best for" line, and look at the starting price for the resolution you actually need. Run a cheap draft first; move to the flagship tier only for the final take.
Frequently asked
Is the most expensive model the best one?
No. Price follows the provider's cost, not quality for your task. A 480p draft on a cheap tier is the right first run; the flagship is for the final render.
Which model should a beginner start with?
Nano Banana Pro for images and Seedance 2.5 or Wan 3.0 for video: both take plain prompts and have prompting guides on their pages.
Can I compare models side by side?
Yes. Generate the same prompt on two models in the Workspace, or build a workflow that fans one prompt out to several models.