Category: Comparison, 15 min read
Arcads is the better buy when your ad needs someone to talk. It puts a scripted actor on screen for up to about a minute, from a library of more than a thousand, and fans one script across ten actors and two languages in a single run. Shotova is the better buy when your ad needs the product shown rather than pitched. It makes a vertical clip of the exact item you uploaded, silent or with the creator saying one short line, billed at 3 credits per second, so a finished eight-second ad is $2.88 on a $12 plan against about $11 on Arcads, which charges a full minute for every clip however short it is. Shotova also makes the photographs and the listing copy that an ad on its own does not.
Choosing a UGC video generator for an online store comes down to a question most comparisons skip: do you want a person to talk about your product, or a person to use it on camera? Arcads is built for the first. Shotova is built for the second, and it does not do the first at all.
That one difference decides more than price does, so it gets its own section here rather than a row in a feature table. Around it sit the numbers that matter to a seller: what one finished ad actually costs on each, what the license on an Arcads video lets you do with it afterwards, and how much of a product page is still empty once the ad is made.
Every Arcads figure below was read on 17 September 2026 from Arcads’ own pages, its help center, its terms of service and its site. Where a number could only be found on somebody else’s blog, this post says so rather than passing it off as published. Arcads wins a real section here, and it is a long one.
If you run paid social and you need a spokesperson to deliver a hook, an offer and a call to action in thirty seconds, Arcads is built for exactly that and Shotova cannot do it. There is no script field in Shotova and no voice: its creator clips are deliberately silent.
If what you need is a short vertical clip of your actual product being picked up, opened and used, and you also need the photographs, the angle sets and the written listing that surround it, Shotova makes all of that from one upload and Arcads makes none of it.
Then there is the entry ticket, which is the widest gap in the comparison. Shotova Starter is $12 a month. Arcads publishes no price at all: arcads.ai/pricing returned a 404 on 17 September 2026, on both the www and the bare domain, and plans appear only once you have an account. The figure reported consistently elsewhere is $110 a month for its entry tier. The table below is the whole comparison on one screen.
| Shotova | Arcads | |
|---|---|---|
| Free option | 10 credits a month, commercial license, no card | 100 free images a day, no free video |
| Entry paid tier | Shotova Starter, $12/mo for 100 credits | Arcads Starter, reported $110/mo for 8,000 credits |
| Published pricing page | Yes, public | No; arcads.ai/pricing returned 404 in September 2026 |
| What the video is | A demonstration by a generated creator, silent or with one short line | A scripted actor speaking to camera |
| Clip length | 5 to 20 seconds for a creator clip; 4 to 12 for a product film | Scripts to 1,500 characters, about 40 to 60 seconds |
| How video is billed | 3 credits per second, one 720p tier | Arcads bills 800 credits a minute per actor, rounded up |
| One short ad | $1.42 to $2.88 for eight seconds, by tier | About $11 a clip on Arcads Starter, any length |
| Video at the entry tier | 33 seconds on Shotova Starter | 600 seconds on Arcads Starter |
| Actor library | Generated per run, no reusable actor | Over 1,000 actors, custom actor, voice clone |
| Batch and hook tools | Not offered | Workflows canvas and a hook rebuilder |
| Listing photography | Yes | Not offered |
| Ghost mannequin and angle sets | Yes | Not offered |
| Listing title and description | Yes, on every plan | Not offered |
| Rights to the output | What you generate stays yours | Non exclusive, personal, non transferable license |
| At the monthly limit | Upgrade anytime, credits land immediately | Starter and Creator accounts temporarily blocked |
Arcads credit rates, plan credit allowances and terms were read off its help center, its terms of service and arcads.ai on 17 September 2026. Its PLAN PRICES are not first party: Arcads publishes no pricing page, so the $110 for Arcads Starter is the list price reported consistently by third party reviews and could not be confirmed on Arcads’ own site. Shotova figures come from its pricing page and its code.
Both products generate a vertical video with a person in it. Almost nothing else about them lines up.
Arcads is an ad factory for performance marketers. You write a script, pick one of more than a thousand AI actors, and the actor reads it to camera with lip sync, emotion control and gestures. A script can run to 1,500 characters, which Arcads puts at roughly 40 to 60 seconds of finished video. Your product reaches the frame through an image step: you upload a photo of the real item as a reference, generate a still of an actor holding it, then convert that still into a talking actor, which Arcads says holds the product consistent for the whole clip. Around that sit a video editor, captions, translation with lip sync, an actor replacement tool, a hook rebuilder and a node based Workflows canvas.
Shotova is shaped around the listing rather than the ad. One product photo goes onto a board and the tools on that board make the different things a listing needs from it: studio and lifestyle images from AI Product Photography, alternate views from Product Angles, floating garment frames from Ghost Mannequin, on body shots from Virtual Model, the title and description from Listing Copywriter, and a vertical clip from the UGC tool or from Product Video. Shotova Canvas runs a whole catalog through in one pass.
The Shotova clip is a demonstration rather than a pitch. A generated creator, a different one on each run, picks the product up in a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom or on a plain tabletop, opens it and uses it, in a vertical 9:16 file at 4, 6, 8, 10 or 12 seconds. What is in frame is the exact object from your photo, held at its true size in the hand.
This section needs its caveat before it needs a number. Arcads publishes no pricing page, so the only prices here that are first party are the credit rates, not the plan prices.
What Arcads does publish, in its help center, is what things cost in credits and what the plans carry. An Arcads talking actor is 800 credits per minute, per actor, and the help center is explicit that length is always rounded up and that two actors in one video are charged twice. The Starter plan carries 8,000 monthly credits and the Creator plan 16,000. Divide those and the plan descriptions in every third party review start to make sense: 8,000 credits is ten one actor minutes, and 16,000 is twenty.
Rounded up is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. A UGC ad for a product page usually runs fifteen to thirty seconds. On Arcads, a fifteen second clip and a sixty second clip cost the same 800 credits. At the widely reported $110 for Arcads Starter, that is about $11.00 for one short ad whether you used the minute or not.
Shotova bills the seconds you asked for. Video is 3 credits per second, at one 720p quality with nothing to choose, in creator lengths from 5 to 20 seconds. An eight second clip is 24 credits, which works out at $2.88 on Shotova Starter at $12 for 100 credits, $1.74 on Shotova Pro at $29 for 400, and $1.42 on Shotova Business at $59 for 1,000. Shotova pricing has the full grid.
One honest correction to the usual framing, because the per second rate does not favour us at all. If you genuinely use the full minute, Arcads is far cheaper per second: $110 for ten minutes is about 18 cents a second against 36 cents a second on Shotova Starter. Arcads also includes far more video at the entry tier, 600 seconds against Shotova Starter’s 33. Shotova wins per ad only because of the rounding and because its clips are short: a twenty second creator clip is 60 credits, about $7.20 on Starter, against $11 for an Arcads clip of any length. Nothing about our rate card is cheaper.
The two behave differently when the month runs out, too. Arcads’ own help center says a Starter or Creator account is temporarily blocked once it reaches the monthly credit limit, and that credits on those plans reset each cycle and do not roll over; only Pro and above roll over and bill the overage. Shotova lets you upgrade at any time with the new credits landing immediately, and Business carries up to 200 unused credits forward while Starter and Pro reset. On expiry alone the two are close to even, so this post does not claim it as a win.
| Route | US dollars per finished clip |
|---|---|
| Arcads Starter, one clip of any length | $11.00 |
| Shotova Starter, eight seconds Standard | $1.92 |
| Shotova Pro, eight seconds Standard | $1.16 |
| Shotova Business, eight seconds Standard | $0.94 |
One talking actor clip on Arcads is 800 credits however long it is, because length is rounded up to the minute, and 800 credits is a tenth of the Starter plan’s 8,000. The Shotova bars are 16 credits, an eight second Standard clip, priced at each tier’s credit value. Read the comparison the right way round: the Arcads $11.00 buys up to a full minute of scripted speech and the Shotova bars buy eight silent seconds, so this chart is the cost of a short product ad, not a like for like second of video. On a full minute Arcads is the cheaper of the two per second.
This is the section that should decide the purchase, and it is not really about either company being better at its job.
An Arcads video is a person saying words you wrote. That is its strength and its entire shape: hooks, offers, testimonials, objection handling, a call to action at the end. If your ad strategy is built on script variants, Arcads is the right tool and nothing in Shotova substitutes for it.
A Shotova clip says one short line at most. The creator speaks a sentence you type in the composer, or one written for you from your own description, sized to fit the seconds you bought. Silent is the default, so a clip with no speech in it is one press away. What the line may never contain is fixed rather than optional: no promise about results, no before and after, no price, no percentage, no comparison with another brand, and nothing about health, medicine or the body. Any line that reaches for one of those is dropped before it is spoken. There is no music either, only room tone, and no text is burned into the frame, so the caption stays yours to write and edit on the platform.
That ceiling is a limitation for some sellers and the whole point for others. A synthetic person making a claim about a supplement, a cosmetic or a health product is a compliance problem on several marketplaces, and it is one neither a silent demonstration nor a line held to what is visible ever creates. Silence also travels: a clip with nobody speaking runs in another market under a different caption without regenerating anything.
The practical reading is short. If the ad is carried by what is said, a script, a hook, an offer, objection handling, then Arcads. If it is carried by what is shown, with a sentence at most over the top of it, Shotova, and it will be briefer and cheaper per ad.
Assume the ad is made and it performs. What is still missing before the product page is finished?
On Arcads, every photograph. Arcads is an advertising product and it carries no listing tools: no clean background main image built to a marketplace spec, no angle or detail set, no floating garment frame, no product title and no description. Its image generation exists to build a still for an actor to hold, and it is generous about that, 100 free images a day across two models, but those are ad frames rather than listing images.
On Shotova all of it comes off the same board and the same upload, and every image tool is on every plan including the free one. The tiers change the credit count, not the tool list. Video is the single exception and needs a paid plan.
The free plan is the part worth testing before anything is spent. It is 10 credits every month rather than once, with a commercial license and no card, which covers a real listing kit: product photos, a floating garment frame, a model shot, angle views and the title and description. Arcads has no free video tier at all, only the daily free images.
| A product page needs | Shotova Starter, $12/mo | Arcads Starter, about $110/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Vertical video | Yes, 50 seconds of it | Yes, 600 seconds of it |
| A person on camera | Yes, silent and generated per run | Yes, scripted, from 1,000+ actors |
| Spoken script and voiceover | No | Yes, to about 60 seconds |
| Clean background main image | Yes | Not offered |
| Angle and detail views | Yes | Not offered |
| Ghost mannequin frames | Yes | Not offered |
| On model apparel shots | Yes | Fashion try-on preset, ad frames |
| Lifestyle and styled scenes | Yes | As generated stills for an actor |
| Title and description | Yes | Not offered |
| Captions burned in | No, you caption on the platform | Yes, 80 credits |
| Translation with lip sync | No | Yes, 240 credits |
| Commercial license | Yes, including the free plan | A non transferable license, not ownership |
A Not offered means the capability appears nowhere on Arcads’ site or help center as of 17 September 2026. Moving up to Arcads Creator doubles the credits and adds captions and workflows rather than adding listing tools; moving up the Shotova tiers changes the credit count and nothing else.
Arcads’ terms are worth ten minutes of any seller’s time before a campaign is built on them, because they are not quite what most buyers assume.
The company behind Arcads is FRESHR, and its terms grant a non exclusive, personal and non transferable license on the video rather than ownership of it. The edits you are permitted to make are listed out: crop it, add music, text, subtitles, emojis, B-rolls and effects, change the format, and add your own branding. Any other modification, the terms say, has to be approved in writing.
The clause an ecommerce owner should read twice is the withdrawal one. Arcads’ actors are backed by real creators, and the terms state that FRESHR may ask the client to delete any videos from all supports where they are used in the event of a withdrawal request made by the creator. A creative that is spending well could have to come down for a reason that has nothing to do with you or your product.
Two smaller ones worth knowing. Unused credits are not refunded or carried forward on a downgrade or a termination, and a subscription has to be canceled at least 72 hours before the period ends, with any period already started due in full. Shotova’s position is shorter: what you have already generated stays yours, the commercial license covers the free plan, and you can cancel from the dashboard with no lock-in.
One more that catches specific catalogs. Arcads’ prohibited content list bars sexual products, naming sex toys and performance enhancing products, along with political content. If that is what you sell, read the list before you subscribe rather than after.
Five things, and a comparison that skipped them would not be worth reading.
Length and speech first, because it is the biggest. Arcads will make a forty to sixty second scripted ad with a talking actor in it. Shotova stops at 12 seconds and never speaks. For a testimonial, an explainer or an offer led direct response ad, that is not a feature gap, it is the entire product.
Arcads has a library of more than a thousand actors, builds a custom actor from a single headshot, and will clone you into a talking actor with your own voice. That buys a consistent brand face across a campaign and across months. Shotova generates a different creator on each run from a small pool, on purpose, so there is no recurring spokesperson to build anything on.
Arcads’ Workflows is a node canvas for fanning one input out into many outputs, and its own documentation gives the example of twenty eight second clips from one script and one product image, ten in English and ten in Spanish, in a single run. Its hook tool reads the first 12 seconds of a viral reference ad and rebuilds that opening around your product. Shotova has no equivalent to either and regenerates one clip at a time.
Model range and post production go the same way. Arcads exposes Veo 3.1, Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro, Kling 2.6 and 3.0, Seedance and Grok for b-roll, priced from 24 credits to 1,620 depending on model and resolution, and adds captions at 80 credits, translation with lip sync at 240 and video extension at 320, with background removal, transcription and voice change costing nothing. Shotova video is one pipeline with two quality tiers.
Finally there is scale behind it. Arcads is bootstrapped and, by its founders’ own public accounts and the trackers that follow them, reached roughly $15 million in annual recurring revenue during 2026 with about 6,000 paying customers. That is a real company with a real roadmap, and it is worth weighing against a smaller tool.
If you are shopping for an Arcads alternative, or weighing Arcads against something broader, the question is not which product is better made. It is which half of the job you are actually buying.
Choose Arcads if your ads need a person to speak, if you test hooks and scripts at volume, if you want one recurring brand face or your own cloned likeness on camera, if you run the same creative across several languages, or if you need clips longer than twelve seconds.
Choose Shotova if the ad should show the product rather than talk about it, if $110 a month is more than your whole video budget, if you still need the photographs and the listing copy as well, if you want a commercial license on a free plan before paying anything, or if a scripted synthetic claim is a compliance risk in your category.
A store spending seriously on paid social could reasonably run both: Arcads for the scripted top of funnel ads, Shotova for the product page, the marketplace images and the short demonstration clips that live on the listing itself. Shotova vs Creatify covers the other scripted avatar option in this series.
Shotova is an AI canvas for online sellers that makes every image and video a store needs from one product photo. Studio scenes, clean backgrounds, angle views, floating garment frames, on model shots, vertical video and the written listing all run on the same board.
Because the tools share that board, nothing is exported from one tool and re-uploaded into the next, and nothing is limited to one product category. The free plan carries a commercial license, so the first test can be a real listing rather than a watermarked demo.
One photo, a vertical clip of the product in use, and every listing image around it. 10 free credits every month, no card.
Arcads publishes no pricing page, so there is no first party answer: arcads.ai/pricing returned a 404 on 17 September 2026 on both the www and the bare domain, and plans are visible only after you create an account. The figure reported consistently by third party reviews is $110 a month for Starter and $220 for Creator. What Arcads does publish is the credit side, and that is enough to work with: Starter carries 8,000 monthly credits, Creator 16,000, and a talking actor costs 800 credits per minute per actor with length always rounded up. That makes Starter ten one actor minutes, so about $11 for a single short ad.
Not for video. Arcads gives every account up to 100 free images a day across two image models, which is a genuinely useful allowance, but generating a talking actor video costs credits and credits come with a paid plan. Its terms of service mention no free trial period. Shotova runs a free plan of 10 credits every month rather than once, with a commercial license and no card, though video on Shotova also needs a paid plan and the free credits cover images and listing copy.
Yes. This is worth stating plainly because a lot of comparisons still claim otherwise. Arcads’ help center documents the workflow: upload a high quality photo of your real product as a reference image, generate a still of an actor holding it, then convert that still into a talking actor, which Arcads says keeps the product consistent through the clip. The same guide notes the trade-off, describing the result as a static actor with limited creative flexibility. Shotova reaches the same place differently, generating a creator who picks the uploaded product up and uses it at its true size in the hand.
It depends on whether your ad talks. Arcads is the better UGC video generator for scripted ads: a spokesperson reading a hook and an offer for up to about a minute, at volume, in several languages, with a reusable brand face. Shotova is the better one for product demonstration clips and for anyone who also needs the listing itself, because the same upload produces the photographs, the angle views, the floating garment frames and the written title and description alongside a 4 to 12 second vertical clip, starting at $12 a month.
Not outright. Arcads’ terms, issued by FRESHR, grant a non exclusive, personal and non transferable license on the video rather than ownership, and list which edits you may make: crop, music, text, subtitles, emojis, B-rolls, effects, format changes and your own branding, with any other modification needing written approval. The terms also state that FRESHR may ask you to delete videos from everywhere they are used if the creator behind the actor makes a withdrawal request. Shotova’s pricing FAQ takes the opposite line: everything you have already generated stays yours, and the commercial license extends to the free plan.
Up to 20 seconds. Creator clips run 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 20 seconds, billed at 3 credits per second, so an eight second clip is 24 credits and a twenty second one is 60. Every file is vertical 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and marketplace video slots. The creator can speak a line you write or one written for you, but it is one short line sized to the clip: for a forty to sixty second scripted read by a reusable actor, Arcads is the tool and Shotova is not.
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