CogVideo / CogVideoX (Zhipu)
Leading#4 in Open sourcehigh confidence
Apache-2.0 CogVideoX (~12.9k GitHub★) — loads natively in HF Diffusers, strong prompt following and smooth frames; a go-to for developers.Our read
Why it ranks #4
About 12.9k GitHub stars, Apache-2.0 licensing and first-class Diffusers support give CogVideoX unusually strong developer adoption in this cohort.Here is the catch
large models still require significant VRAM
short clips and limited native editing controls
visual quality varies with quantization and hardware settings
Does this well
permissive license and mature developer tooling
good prompt following for an open model
easier integration through Hugging Face
Pricing
Checked by hand on 2026-07-23. Prices in this category change often — if this looks wrong, it probably is.
Key features
Text and image-to-video modelsDiffusers integrationQuantized and memory-saving inferenceFine-tuning support
Quick facts
More in this area
The rest of the Open source column.- 1Open-Sora (hpcaitech)The category-defining open-source video generator (~29k GitHub★) — text/image-to-video with performance comparable to HunyuanVideo on VBench.
- 2Wan (Alibaba, Wan2.2)Alibaba's Wan (~16.8k GitHub★) — widely regarded as the strongest open-weight text-to-video model; 1.3B variant runs on 8GB VRAM.
- 3HunyuanVideo (Tencent)Tencent's 13B open video model (~12.4k GitHub★) — a benchmark reference for open-source cinematic text-to-video quality.
- 5LTX-Video (Lightricks)Lightricks' real-time DiT video model (~10.7k GitHub★) — notable for fast, production-capable generation and active releases.
- 6Mochi 1 (Genmo)Genmo's Apache-2.0 Mochi 1 (~3.7k GitHub★) — a recognized open text-to-video model, lower adoption than the leaders above.
- 7HBAI-Ltd/Toonflow-appOpen-source desktop app that turns a novel or script into an animated short drama, chaining AI screenwriting, storyboarding and shot generation.