AdCreative.ai, Creatify, Pencil and Arcads all promise ads made by AI, but they sell four different jobs: scored banner variants by the download, product videos billed by the second, multi-format generations billed per resize, and AI-actor UGC clips billed per take. This guide compares them on the meter that decides what you actually pay.
Starter, monthly billing ($20/mo billed yearly). 20 download credits a month; generation itself is unlimited.
Standard plan on the current pricing page. A watermarked free plan with 10 credits a month also exists.
Core plan, monthly billing ($11/mo billed annually). 50 generations a month, one workspace.
No public price list — prices appear only inside the app after signup. Reviewers report Starter at $110/mo; see the pricing note below.
| AdCreative.ai | Creatify | Pencil | Arcads | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | EC / DTC teams producing many on-brand banner variants | Product sellers who want video ads from a URL, cheaply | Performance marketers testing many formats against account data | Brands whose main format is talking-actor UGC ads |
| Main outputs | Static banners, product photos, ad copy; video on higher plans | Video ads, avatar videos, AI Shorts, images | Images, video, text, auto-resized variants | UGC-style talking-actor video ads |
| How the meter runs | Per download (generation unlimited) | Per 15 seconds of video (rounded up); 1 credit per image | Per generation — and per resize | Per generation: 800 credits per talking-actor video |
| Free option | No free plan — 7-day trial | Yes — 10 credits/mo, watermarked exports | No free plan — 6 guided ads at signup | No free plan — 3-day trial, 1,000 credits, card required |
| Paid plans from | Starter $39/mo monthly ($20/mo yearly), 20 credits | Standard $15/mo, 55 credits (see pricing note) | Core $14/mo monthly ($11/mo yearly), 50 generations | Starter 8,000 credits/mo; dollar price not published (reported $110/mo in-app) |
| Prediction score | Creative Scoring AI — the vendor's own model score per creative | No headline per-creative score; competitor tracking and ad cloning on Pro | Media Performance Score — referenced to your connected Meta history | None published |
| Actors / avatars | UGC-style video features on higher plans | 300 AI actors on Standard, 1,500 on Pro plus 3 custom avatars | Not actor-led; multi-model generation instead | 300–1,500 AI actors by plan; clone-yourself on Pro and up |
| Rights, in one line | Product pages promise commercial use, but full asset IP rights are listed as an Enterprise feature — read your plan's terms | FAQ says you own your creatives; the terms' licence is non-transferable and revocable on a policy breach | Not verified from public sources for this guide — check the terms before client work | A non-exclusive licence, not ownership; no exclusivity, and edits are limited to a listed set |
| Trade-off to know | The jump from Starter (20 credits) to Professional ($249/mo, 300 credits) is steep, and the vendor's own page shows inconsistent figures in places | Pricing was restructured recently — older $39 / $99 figures still circulate in reviews | Resizes burn generations, and unused generations do not roll over | No public prices at all, and short clips cost the same 800 credits as a 2-minute one |
Prices checked November 2026, USD, before tax. Creatify pricing note: Creatify's pricing page now shows Standard $15/mo, Pro $55/mo and Max $95/mo (Business from $195/mo), with roughly 30% off on annual billing. Many reviews still cite the previous structure (Starter $39/mo, Pro $99/mo) — the page has been restructured, so confirm the plan name, credits and price on the checkout screen. Arcads pricing note: Arcads publishes no pricing page; the credit amounts above are from its official help center, while dollar figures ($110 / $220 / a reported $550 for Pro) come from reviewers who reached the in-app paywall in October 2026 and are not vendor-published prices. AdCreative.ai note: some blocks of the vendor's pricing page still show older credit or brand counts, so confirm the allowance at checkout. Plans change — always confirm on the vendor's site before you buy.
The word "credit" means four different things in this category — a download, a generation, 15 seconds of video, or one whole clip. Headline prices are not comparable until you convert them into your own monthly workload. The arithmetic below uses only published prices and published credit rates; it is calculation, not testing.
| Workload | Tool & plan | The math | Effective cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 static banner downloads a month | AdCreative.ai | Starter's base tier holds only 20 credits. The 50-credit Starter tier is $89/mo on monthly billing: $89 ÷ 50. (Professional works out to $249 ÷ 300 = $0.83 each, but only if you really download 300.) | $1.78 per download on the 50-credit tier; $1.95 on the base tier |
| 20 video ads of 30 seconds a month | Creatify (current pricing page) | A 30-second ad costs 10 credits (5 per 15 seconds). 20 ads need 200 credits — Standard's 55 credits cover about five ads. Pro holds 280 credits for $55/mo: $55 ÷ 20 ads. | $2.75 per finished 30-second ad on Pro (about $1.96 each if you spend all 280 credits) |
| 20 ad concepts, each in 4 sizes | Pencil | Each concept costs 1 generation plus 3 resizes = 4 generations, so 80 generations in total. Core's 50 generations are not enough; Growth ($55/mo, 250 generations) is the fitting plan: $55 ÷ 80. | $0.69 per delivered size at this workload; $0.22 per generation if the full quota is used |
| 10 finished AI-actor ads a month | Arcads | One generation = 800 credits. Starter's 8,000 credits = 10 generations, at a reported $110/mo = $11 per generation. If, as an illustration, one in two takes is a keeper, 10 finished ads need 20 generations (Creator tier, reported $220/mo). | $11 per take; illustratively $22 per finished ad at a 1-in-2 keeper rate (an assumption for the math, not a measured rate) |
Two structural traps to notice. First, Arcads charges the same 800 credits for a 15-second hook as for a 2-minute clip on its Arcads 1.0 model, while Creatify's per-second meter does the opposite — short clips are cheap, and a 16-second ad is billed as 30 seconds because usage is rounded up. Second, AdCreative.ai's Ultimate plan carries the same 300 base credits as Professional at roughly four times the price: what you are buying there is 25 brands and 20 users, not more creatives.
AdCreative.ai builds ad sets from your brand kit — logo, colors, product images — and generates static banners, product visuals and ad copy in the sizes ad platforms use, with video features concentrated on higher plans. Generation is unlimited; the meter runs on downloads. Starter ($39/mo monthly, $29 quarterly, $20/mo billed yearly) includes 20 download credits, one brand and one user. Professional ($249/mo monthly, $125/mo yearly) raises that to 300 credits and multi-brand, multi-user use. Ultimate ($999/mo monthly, $500/mo yearly) starts from the same 300 credits and mainly adds brands (25) and users (20); Enterprise is custom-priced. Every creative receives a Creative Scoring AI score — the vendor's own prediction of conversion potential, trained, the vendor says, on large volumes of historical ad spend. Treat that score as the vendor's self-reported model output: a way to order your testing queue, not a measured result and never a guarantee of performance.
Creatify's core workflow is URL-to-video: paste a product link and it drafts a script and renders it with AI actors, templates and voiceover, alongside image ads and AI Shorts. The meter is time: video ads, avatar videos and AI Shorts cost 5 credits per 15 seconds, rounded up, images cost 1 credit, and revisions cost credits too unless they qualify as free on higher plans. The free plan gives 10 credits a month with watermarked exports — enough for two short videos. On the current pricing page, Standard ($15/mo) holds 55 credits and 300 AI actors; Pro ($55/mo) holds 280 credits, 1,500 actors, 3 custom avatars, a competitor ad tracker and ad cloning; Max ($95/mo) holds 730 credits and 3 seats, with Business tiers above that. Paid plans include an ad launcher for Meta, TikTok and AppLovin. Note the restructure: reviews written before late 2026 describe a $39 Starter and a $99 Pro — the plan names and prices on the live page have changed.
Pencil, part of The Brandtech Group, is a multi-model generation platform: it routes image, video and text generation through several underlying AI models inside one brand-controlled workflow, with auto-resizing for the formats major ad platforms require. Its meter is the generation — and resizing an existing creative into a new format costs one generation per format. Core ($14/mo monthly, $11/mo billed annually) includes 50 generations and one workspace. Growth ($55/mo monthly, $44/mo annually) includes 250 generations and unlimited workspaces. Pro is custom-priced with unlimited generations and enterprise governance. There is no standing free plan; new accounts can create six ads through a guided signup. Its distinguishing feature is the Media Performance Score, described as a predicted click-through percentile measured against the ads in your own connected Meta accounts. Like AdCreative.ai's score, it is the vendor's own model output — self-reported, useful as a relative ranking inside your account, and not a promise about any individual ad.
Arcads, operated by Freshr SAS in France, does one job: you give it a script and an AI actor performs it to camera as a UGC-style ad — testimonial, demo or unboxing formats for TikTok, Instagram and Meta placements. Its official help center publishes the credit structure even though dollar prices stay inside the app: Starter 8,000 credits, Creator 16,000, Pro 48,000, Scale 96,000 and Business 192,000 credits a month, with annual billing at 20% off and rollover only from Pro upwards. A talking-actor generation costs 800 credits — a flat rate for a clip of up to 2 minutes on the Arcads 1.0 model, and per started minute on its Audio-Driven and OmniHuman models. Actor libraries grow by plan (300 / 1,000 / 1,500), with custom actors and clone-yourself on Pro and above. Reviewers who reached the in-app paywall in October 2026 reported Starter at $110/mo and Creator at $220/mo — roughly $11 per generation — but those are reported figures, not a published price list, and a French account was shown euro prices instead.
Static banner sets → AdCreative.ai or Pencil. Video from a product URL → Creatify. Talking-actor UGC as your main format → Arcads, or Creatify if budget rules. Buying a UGC tool to make banners, or a banner tool to make UGC, is the expensive mistake in this category.
Write down your real month: how many finished ads, how long each video runs, how many sizes per concept, and how many takes you usually discard. Then run each tool's credit math on that month, as in the cost section above. The cheapest headline price is rarely the cheapest finished ad.
AdCreative.ai's and Pencil's scores are each vendor's own model output, not independent measurement. Use them to decide what to test first, then let your actual campaign data overrule them. No score on this page is a guarantee of clicks, conversions or return on ad spend.
Confirm what your plan's terms say about owning versus licensing the output, and about delivering it to clients if you are an agency. Then plan for platform rules: Meta's published guidance says ads created or significantly edited with generative AI — including ads with photorealistic AI people — may carry an "AI Info" label, and ads about social issues or politics must disclose AI use (source: Meta Newsroom and Transparency Center guidance on generative-AI transparency for ads). Never script an AI actor to pose as a real customer describing a real experience they never had.
It depends on the meter. The lowest subscription entries are Pencil Core at $14/mo and Creatify Standard at $15/mo, but they buy different things: 50 generations (resizes included) versus 55 credits (a 30-second video ad costs 10). For finished 30-second video ads, Creatify's Pro works out to roughly $2 per ad if you use the full credit quota. For AI-actor UGC specifically, Arcads' reported $110/mo Starter is the most expensive entry here. Run the math on your own monthly volume before choosing.
No score here comes with a guarantee, and none should be read as one. AdCreative.ai's Creative Scoring AI and Pencil's Media Performance Score are predictions produced by each vendor's own models, using data and methods the vendors describe but third parties have not fully validated. A higher score means the vendor's model expects that variant to do better than a lower-scored one, based on patterns in its training data. Real results depend on your product, audience, offer and account — the scores are a testing order, nothing more.
All four tools are sold for advertising use, but the legal shape differs. Creatify's FAQ says you own your creatives, while its terms frame the grant as a non-transferable licence with conditions. Arcads grants a non-exclusive licence rather than ownership, with a limited list of permitted edits. AdCreative.ai lists complete asset IP rights as an Enterprise feature, so standard-plan users should read their subscriber terms. For Pencil, we could not verify the output-rights wording from public sources while compiling this guide. If the output will be delivered to a client, confirm the client-use position in the terms of the exact plan before you sell the work.
Often, effectively yes. Under Meta's published guidance on generative-AI transparency, an ad image or video that was created or significantly edited with generative AI, or that includes a photorealistic AI-generated person, may be labelled "AI Info" by Meta's systems — and from June 2026 Meta has said detection extends to ads made with third-party AI tools (source: Meta Newsroom, February 2025, and Meta Transparency Center). Minor edits such as resizing or color correction are excluded. Ads about social issues, elections or politics must disclose AI use outright. Other platforms and some jurisdictions have their own rules, and presenting an AI actor as a genuine customer testimonial can breach advertising and consumer-protection rules regardless of labels. When in doubt, disclose.
Because this guide is compiled from publicly available vendor information — pricing pages, help centers and terms — not hands-on testing. We did not run paid accounts to produce sample ads for this page, so we publish no opinion about which tool's output looks or converts best. Where a judgment appears, it is arithmetic on published prices and credit rates, shown next to the numbers so you can check it yourself.