Hailuo AI is MiniMax's video generation product, built around a dedicated subject-reference tool that keeps a character's face and outfit steady across an entire clip, aimed at solo creators, startups and students who need short, consistent video fast. Picasso IA is a curated catalog of 488 models spanning image, video, audio and 3D, with free credits to start and one guided interface for every format.
Hailuo AI and Picasso IA both let you type a prompt and get a video back, but they are built for different jobs. Hailuo AI, from MiniMax, is a dedicated video generation product: text-to-video, image-to-video, and a subject-reference tool built specifically to hold a character's face, outfit and style steady across an entire clip, wrapped in a mobile-first app aimed at solo creators, startups and students who need short, consistent video. Picasso IA is a studio: 488 models we select and maintain ourselves, covering image, video, audio and 3D behind one guided interface, in six languages, with free credits the moment you sign up.
If your whole project lives inside short video clips and the one thing that matters most is a character or product looking the same from shot to shot, Hailuo AI built a specific tool for exactly that job, and nothing in our catalog matches a dedicated subject-reference feature purpose-built for video consistency. If instead your work spans stills, video, voice or a 3D asset and you would rather pick from a catalog of vetted models than commit to one vendor's single engine, Picasso IA is built for that.
Neither approach is a lesser way to work. One treats video consistency as the single problem worth solving completely; the other treats format breadth as the problem worth solving, so one account covers stills, motion, sound and 3D. The sections below cover what each side gives away free, what changes when you pay, how each one generates, what each covers, and who should pick which. Where Hailuo AI is genuinely the stronger tool, this page says so at length.
Eleven rows, the first seven answered with a yes or a no, the last four needing a phrase instead of a mark because a tick cannot describe them honestly.
| Feature | Picasso IA | Hailuo AI |
|---|---|---|
| Text-to-video generation | Yes | Yes |
| Image-to-video generation | Yes | Yes |
| 3D mesh generation from an image | Yes | No |
| Audio narration and text-to-speech voices | Yes | No |
| Curated catalog spanning image, video, audio and 3D | Yes | No |
| Free credits to start, no card required | Yes | Yes |
| Dedicated subject-reference tool built for character consistency | No | Yes |
| Model breadth | 488 curated models, one account | One in-house video model |
| Character consistency across a clip | Prompting and reference images | Purpose-built subject lock |
| Primary focus | Full creative suite | Video generation only |
| Best fit | Many formats, one account | Fast, consistent short clips |
The tally: Picasso IA leads on 4 rows out of 11, Hailuo AI on 2, and 5 come down to taste and workflow.
Read that tally as a warning against oversimplifying, not a verdict either way. The rows Hailuo AI wins are not minor: a dedicated subject-reference tool built specifically to hold a character steady across a clip is not something our catalog offers at all, by design, and if consistent characters in video are the whole job, the rest of this table will not change your mind. What a row cannot show is depth on the other side: our win on breadth means the same account that generates a consistent-enough video can also remove a background, upscale a photo, generate a voiceover, or turn a picture into an exportable 3D mesh, without opening a second tool.
A new Picasso IA account starts with free credits that spend on the same 488 models everyone else uses, not a demo tier: you can run a frontier image model, a video model or a text-to-speech voice before deciding anything. The interface is in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic and Hindi, and you can browse the community collection and the effects gallery without paying, which shows you what the catalog produces rather than what a page claims it produces.
Hailuo AI's free tier lets you generate video clips and try the subject-reference tool before committing to anything, a genuinely useful way to see whether its character consistency holds up on your own reference image before paying. Exactly how many free generations, how long the clips run, or how the free tier's limits are structured is Hailuo AI's own number to publish and it changes often enough that quoting it here would go stale fast; check Hailuo AI's own site for what is current.
The honest split: if you want to generate something today across several formats with zero setup and see the credit cost before you commit, Picasso IA is where that happens reliably from the first minute. If you want to test whether a dedicated consistency tool actually keeps a character's face the same across a whole clip, Hailuo AI's free side lets you find that out before you pay anything.
On Picasso IA, paying buys credits, and credits are the entire economy: every generation shows its cost before you run it, heavier jobs cost more, and plans differ only in how many credits you get. Current numbers live on the pricing page; we keep them there rather than in articles, because plans change and a stale number helps nobody.
On Hailuo AI, paying raises the ceiling on generation volume, clip length and resolution, and access to newer model versions, the shape most video-generation subscriptions take. Specific tiers and what unlocks at each one are Hailuo AI's own numbers to publish and change, and we deliberately do not restate them here, since a figure copied into this article would be wrong within a quarter.
The practical way to decide which side's paid tier suits you is to be honest about what recurs in your work. If you generate a wide range of one-off images, videos, voices or 3D assets that do not need to share one character across every piece, credits that track exactly what you ran map cleanly onto Picasso IA. If your paid time keeps going into short clips that all need the same face, product or mascot to look identical, a tool built specifically around that lock, the way Hailuo AI's is, solves a problem ours was never built to solve as tightly.
This is where the two products stop resembling each other, so it earns the longest section, and it is where Hailuo AI's genuine strengths deserve real space rather than a passing mention.
Picasso IA does not train anything and does not build its own engines. Nobody uploads a model to our catalog, and no account trains a custom one either; we select and maintain the 488 models that are in it. The FLUX family for photographic realism, Seedream 5 Pro for illustration, nano banana for edits that preserve the original image, Kling and Veo for video, hundreds more, each vetted, each with a visible credit cost. When a stronger model ships, it appears next to the old one in the same interface, and picking a model is the entire skill required.
Hailuo AI makes the opposite bet, and does it well. It is a single, purpose-built video model from MiniMax, not an aggregator, and everything about it is tuned around one job: turning a prompt or a reference image into a clip that moves naturally and, with a subject reference supplied, keeps that subject's face, outfit and look consistent start to finish. That subject-reference capability is Hailuo AI's standout strength and a genuinely different capability from anything in our catalog: Picasso IA can carry an uploaded reference image into a single edit or generation, but nothing in our lineup is a dedicated, purpose-built lock on a character's identity across an entire generated clip the way Hailuo AI's tool is. For a solo creator, a startup or a student who needs a mascot, a product or a recurring face to look the same across a run of short clips without training a custom model or hand-tuning a prompt every time, that single feature can be the whole decision.
Where the two philosophies genuinely diverge is depth versus breadth. Hailuo AI's approach asks you to commit to one engine and get very good results on the one job that engine was built for; it will not out-perform the very top tier of specialist tools in a blind side-by-side, and at its price point it does not need to, because the value is in how much consistency and quality it delivers for what it costs. Picasso IA's approach asks for a different kind of commitment: pick from 488 vetted models across every format, and the result is ready, with no single engine to learn the quirks of. Someone building short-form video content where the same character needs to reappear identically across a run of clips should try Hailuo AI's subject-reference tool before assuming a broader catalog covers the same ground, because for that specific job, it genuinely does not. Our own guide to consistent AI characters covers what a prompting-and-reference approach can achieve on Picasso IA, worth reading against Hailuo AI's purpose-built consistency tool before deciding which fits a recurring-character project better.
For video, both aggregate strong engines, though from different directions: Hailuo AI is the engine itself, purpose-built for text-to-video and image-to-video, with natural-feeling motion and the subject-reference tool as its centerpiece. Picasso IA offers dedicated engines including Kling v3 and Veo 3.1 alongside Hailuo AI's own models where we integrate them, with image-to-video so a still becomes the first frame of a shot, and the freedom to try more than one engine on the same idea to see which one reads a prompt best.
For still images, Picasso IA covers a wide range of vetted models chosen for being good rather than for fitting one company's roadmap, including edit-preserving tools like nano banana and dedicated photographic and illustration models. Hailuo AI's product is built around video first, and treats a still primarily as raw material, a reference image to animate or a first frame to build a clip from, rather than a destination in its own right.
For audio, Picasso IA's side includes 464 text-to-speech voices across dozens of languages for narrating videos, plus music generation, both useful once a Hailuo AI clip needs a voice track or a soundtrack laid over it. Audio generation is not part of what Hailuo AI's own product does.
For 3D, only one side offers it. Picasso IA's image-to-3D through Hunyuan3D 3.1 turns a picture into a textured, exportable mesh, the kind of asset covered in our image to 3D guide. Hailuo AI does not generate 3D assets; its product is video, start to finish.
Hailuo AI's editing surface stays close to its core job: refining a generated clip, adjusting camera movement, and re-running a subject reference until a character reads correctly, all in service of the one video it is producing rather than a general editing toolkit.
Picasso IA treats editing as a set of dedicated tools that accept any image, generated on our platform or not, without needing a specific engine's clip behind it first. Upload a phone photo and remove its background for the workflow in our background removal guide, upscale a low resolution image with the tools in our photo upscaler guide, or hand nano banana an instruction like changing a shirt color without touching the face. Every editing tool shows its credit cost up front, so testing an upscaler on a real client file is a cheap experiment rather than a leap of faith.
The practical split: if the asset is a video clip mid-production on Hailuo AI, its own tools stay closest to that specific job. If you are editing a still image, whether it started as a photo, a screenshot, or a frame pulled from any video, Picasso IA's dedicated editing tools do not ask which engine made it first.
Speed on Picasso IA is straightforward: fast image models return in seconds, frontier models take longer, video takes minutes because video is expensive to compute anywhere, and the credit cost tracks that reality before you commit. Picasso IA also limits how many generations one account runs at once, which keeps the queue fair and stops a runaway script from draining your own credits.
Speed on Hailuo AI reflects a product tuned for one job: a clip typically returns in a predictable window once a prompt or reference image is submitted, since the whole pipeline is built around that single task rather than juggling many model types. Hailuo AI's own guidance is the source for current generation times, since those numbers move as the underlying model changes.
Licensing deserves the same care on both platforms. On Hailuo AI, review the platform's own terms for commercial use of generated clips, particularly around any subject reference built from a real person's photo, since a likeness carries its own consent considerations beyond the model's own license. On Picasso IA, model licenses come from the underlying providers and can differ between models, so check the page for the one your business depends on. On both, no license removes the risk that a generated video can resemble a trademark, a real person or a distinctive style, and a character built from real reference photos deserves particular care around consent before it goes anywhere commercial.
Eight honest reasons, four per side, compressing everything above. If your real alternatives lean toward a different video specialist rather than a character-consistency engine, the Runway comparison may match your decision better than this page does.
Choose Picasso IA instead when you want image, video, audio and 3D under one account without committing to a single video engine, would rather pick from 488 vetted models than learn one product's specific workflow, need an exportable 3D mesh or a voiceover alongside your video, or want to start free and see the credit cost of every generation before you run it.
Most people end up using both for different jobs rather than replacing one with the other, so treat this as adding a tool, not abandoning one. Keep any Hailuo AI clips and subject references exactly as they are while you test; nothing about trying Picasso IA requires giving anything up.
For a broad range of formats without committing to one engine, yes, and for a locked character across a run of video clips, not quite as tightly. If you want vetted models across image, video, audio and 3D under one account, Picasso IA is a genuinely strong alternative. If what you actually need is a purpose-built subject-reference tool that keeps a character's identity steady across an entire clip, Hailuo AI built specific tooling for that and we have not, and no amount of catalog breadth substitutes for it.
Not directly as project files, since the two run on different underlying models, but nothing stops you from using a still frame pulled from a Hailuo AI clip as a reference image for a Picasso IA generation. Many of our models accept an uploaded image alongside a prompt, so a Hailuo AI frame can seed a new edit, variation or video on our side, even though it is not the same subject-lock mechanism Hailuo AI's own tool uses.
Not a dedicated one, and this is one of the clearest differences here. Picasso IA supports uploading a reference image into a generation or an edit, and several of our models, nano banana among them, are genuinely good at preserving what is already in an image. But nothing in our catalog is a purpose-built feature engineered specifically to lock a character's face and outfit across an entire video clip the way Hailuo AI's subject-reference tool is. If that exact capability is the job, Hailuo AI is built for it.
Yes, and more. The catalog includes multiple video engines, Kling v3 and Veo 3.1 among them, covering text-to-video and image-to-video, plus audio and image-to-3D through Hunyuan3D 3.1, which turns a picture into a textured mesh. Video costs more credits than a still image, and the cost is shown before you run the job.
No, on both. Picasso IA needs a prompt or an uploaded reference image and a model choice; picking one is the whole first step. Hailuo AI needs a prompt or reference image too, and its subject-reference tool works from a single reference photo rather than any lengthy training process, so getting a first consistent clip does not require a heavy setup on either side.
We deliberately avoid printing numbers for either product in an article, because prices and allowances change and a stale figure misleads more than an absent one. Picasso IA sells credit-based plans where every generation shows its cost up front; current numbers are on the pricing page. Hailuo AI's plans and what each tier includes are published on its own site and change independently of anything we control.
Treat commercial use carefully on either platform. On Picasso IA, licensing comes from each model's provider and can differ between models, so check the specific model page before building a business on it. On Hailuo AI, review its own terms for commercial use, especially for a clip built around a subject reference of a real person, since a likeness raises consent questions the platform's license alone does not resolve. On both, review outputs for resemblance to trademarks, real people or distinctive styles before publishing.
Because consistency across frames and shots is the one problem its subject-reference tool was built to solve, and a model tuned end-to-end for that single job can outperform a broader catalog on exactly that metric. Picasso IA's video models are strong general-purpose engines, but none of them ship a dedicated subject-lock feature the way Hailuo AI's does, so a side-by-side test built specifically around character consistency will tend to favor Hailuo AI.
No. There is no partnership, no affiliate program and no payment in either direction between Picasso IA and Hailuo AI. Hailuo AI's name appears on this page because people comparing a dedicated character-consistency video model against a curated multi-format catalog search for exactly this comparison, and the most useful answer we can give is an honest one rather than a sales pitch dressed as a comparison.
Genuinely, yes. Its subject-reference tool gives solo creators, startups and students a real way to keep a character or product looking the same across a run of clips without a custom training pipeline, its motion quality holds up well for the kind of short-form content most creators actually need, and its mobile-first app meets people where they already shoot and post. It will not out-perform the very top tier of specialist video tools in a blind side-by-side, and at its price point it does not have to, because the value it delivers for solo creators and small teams is real. Competing with it honestly means admitting that a project built around one consistent character in short video is better served by a tool built for exactly that than by a curated catalog that was never trying to be one.
Both products reward someone who shows up with a clear idea of what they need, and the cheapest way to find out which one fits is to try each on a real job rather than a hypothetical one. Open the Picasso IA toolkit with a prompt you already trust, spend the free credits, and if the results earn a place in your week, the pricing page is where the plans live.
