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Runway vs Wan

A side-by-side comparison of Runway and Wan, two Video tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.

Compared from listings verified as of

Runway

Video

Video AI with Gen-series models and a full timeline editor.

View Runway

Wan

Video

Open-source text- and image-to-video generation from Alibaba.

View Wan

At a glance

Feature comparison of Runway and Wan
AttributeRunwayWan
CategoryVideoVideo
PricingFREEMIUMFREEMIUM
License (differs)ProprietaryOpen core
Deployment (differs)CloudHybrid
Platforms (differs)WebWeb, API
Model support (differs)Single model (proprietary)Self-contained (on-device)
Vendor (differs)RunwayAlibaba (Tongyi Lab)

The honest brief

Runway

Pairs its Gen-series models with a real timeline editor and camera/motion controls, so client work lands here.

  • Full editor, not just a generator
  • Reference-driven control + Act-One
  • Clean 4K scaling
  • Longest-running studio in the space
  • Credits deplete fast on long clips
  • Pricier than Pika/Luma per clip
  • Web-only

Wan

A fully open video model you can self-host or run free online, matching closed models like Sora on the VBench benchmark.

  • Public weights, training and inference code
  • Self-host or use free at wan.video
  • Text-, image-, and edit-to-video
  • Top VBench open-model scores
  • Self-hosting needs strong GPUs
  • Short clips at 480p/720p
  • Hosted site has usage limits
  • Docs and tooling skew technical