Text to Video: Which AI Platform for What Job

Sora has been discontinued. OpenAI announced the shutdown of the Sora app and API in March 2026, so it no longer appears in the comparison below. Older Sora guides on this site are kept for reference.

Text-to-video is where most people start with AI video: you describe a shot and the model invents everything, from the framing to the light to the motion. That freedom is also its weakness, because you control nothing but the words. Each of the major platforms now has a clear reputation for one or two things, and that is the sensible way to choose. This guide compares them by job. If you already have a still you want to animate, read Image to Video: Which AI Platform for What Job instead, because the strengths there are different.

The platforms at a glance

Model names and limits change often. Where a platform renames a mode or raises a cap, look for the function described here rather than the number.

Sound with the picture

For a long time every AI clip came out silent. That is no longer true for the leading text-to-video tools. Veo 3.1 in Flow generates dialogue, effects and ambience, and Google has extended audio to Flow features such as Frames to Video and Extend. Gemini Omni Flash, also in Flow, works from text, images, video or audio, and Google says it keeps a character’s identity and voice consistent across scenes. Kling 3.0 produces speech in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, with the option of different languages for different characters. MiniMax H3 outputs stereo audio with the video and, according to MiniMax, handles dialogue in 11 languages. The open-weight LTX-2 family also generates audio and picture together.

If dialogue is part of the brief, write the spoken line in quotation marks, keep it short, and name who says it. Expect to re-run for lip timing. For a deeper look at prompting sound, see Veo 3 Prompting: Dialogue, Sound Effects and Ambience.

Length and multiple shots

Clip length still varies widely. Veo 3.1 in Flow offers 4, 6 or 8 seconds, Omni Flash up to 10, Runway Gen-4.5 up to 10, Kling 3.0 and MiniMax H3 up to 15, and Luma Ray3.2 up to 20 at 1080p. Some newer models on hosted marketplaces go further, but longer is not always better: the longer a single generation runs, the more room the model has to drift.

The more useful change is multi-shot generation. Kling 3.0 follows instructions for several shots in one clip, including shot-reverse-shot and cross-cutting, and its Omni model adds a storyboard where you set duration, shot size, perspective and camera movement per shot. For a dialogue exchange or a short product story, that saves stitching separate clips together. Everywhere else, plan one shot per generation and cut them together in an editor.

Control and finish

If the clip is heading into a professional edit, finishing quality matters. Luma Ray3.2 is the clearest choice here: it generates native HDR in 16-bit colour with EXR export, and its Draft Mode lets you explore cheaply before committing credits to a final. Flow has added 360p drafts at lower credit cost and 1080p or 4K export. Runway Gen-4.5 is known for cinematic realism and camera language, and Runway’s app also hosts other providers’ models, so you can compare several engines without leaving one interface. For prompt structure that holds up on any of these, see the Kling Prompting Guide, which applies well beyond Kling.

Running it yourself

Hosted tools are easiest, but some work needs local control: private material, fine-tuning on your own footage, or high volume without credits. LTX-2 and its successors are released with open weights under Lightricks’ community licence, with ComfyUI support. MiniMax H3 released its base weights in August 2026 under the MiniMax H3 Community License, covering text and first-and-last-frame to video and reference-to-video. Earlier Wan releases are also available to run locally. Read each licence before commercial use, because none of them is a standard open-source licence. The trade-off between running locally and paying for hosting is covered in Local vs Hosted Stable Diffusion and Flux.

Whichever route you choose, testing the same prompt across several engines only pays off if you can compare the results later. Keeping every clip with its prompt, model and settings, which is what Dreamdrive does automatically, turns those tests into something you can actually read back.

Try it

Run this prompt through two or three platforms with the same aspect ratio and the shortest available duration.

A narrow cobbled street in an old European town just after rain, a cyclist in a yellow raincoat rides slowly away from camera, reflections in the puddles, warm shop lights coming on, slow tracking shot following the cyclist, sound of tyres on wet stone and distant church bells

Compare four things: did the camera track rather than cut, did the raincoat stay yellow, do the reflections behave, and did the sound match the picture where audio is available? Then add a second shot described in the same prompt on Kling 3.0 to see multi-shot at work. Note which model and version you used, because by the time you repeat the test something will have changed.