Quick answer
Wan is Alibaba's family of open-weight video models with text-to-video, image-to-video, and editing variants in several sizes, including ones that run on a single consumer GPU. HunyuanVideo is Tencent's open-weight model aimed at the high end, with larger models that need serious hardware. Both are hosted by providers such as Replicate and fal for pay-per-clip use, and both have permissive licences with regional restrictions worth reading.
Closed video models like Sora 2, Veo, and Kling set the quality bar, but they charge per clip and decide what you may generate. Open-weight models let you run generation yourself, fine-tune on your own footage, and build products without a per-second bill. In 2026 the two that matter are Wan and HunyuanVideo.
Quality and capability
Both produce clips that compete with closed models on many prompts, with the usual open-model caveats around text rendering, complex physics, and long clips. Hunyuan's larger models are generally regarded as the higher ceiling for cinematic quality; Wan's larger sizes are close, and Wan's range of variants, including image-to-video, first-and-last-frame, and editing, covers more of a production workflow.
Hardware
- Wan's smaller models run on a consumer GPU with around 8 to 12 GB of VRAM at reduced resolution; larger sizes want 24 GB or more
- HunyuanVideo's main models need high-end GPUs, typically 40 GB-class or multiple cards, though quantised community versions lower the bar
- Either can be rented by the clip on Replicate, fal, or Alibaba Cloud, which is where most people start
Ecosystem
Wan has the larger community: more ComfyUI workflows, more LoRA fine-tunes, and more tutorials, partly because it runs on hardware people own. Hunyuan has strong support too, but its audience skews toward studios and researchers with the hardware to use it fully.
Licensing
Both are released under custom permissive licences that allow commercial use with conditions, including restrictions in certain regions and for very large deployments. Read the licence before shipping a product; the terms differ from Apache or MIT and have changed between versions.
Related reading
Bottom line
Wan for accessibility, variants, and community. Hunyuan for maximum quality if you have the GPUs. For most people the practical path is a hosted provider first, then a local Wan setup once you know the workflow.
