Disclosure: some links on this page may be affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Read the disclosure.

By the toolist.ai editors. Researched from Pika's own pages and hands-on tests published by others, not hands-on tested by toolist.ai. Updated October 23, 2026.

Pika review: pricing, features and what testers found

Pika is an AI creative platform that, since its relaunch on September 17, 2026, puts Pika's own Pika 2.5 video model and effects such as Pikaffects beside other companies' video, image and sound models (Seedance 2.5, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, MiniMax H3 and more) in over 25 apps on one credit balance. Paid plans start at $10 a month ($8 billed yearly) for 900 credits, and every paid plan includes a commercial licence.

Our take

Pika suits social creators who want short clips and viral effects with many video models on one subscription: since its September 17, 2026 relaunch, its apps run Pika's own Pika 2.5, Pikaffects and Pikaframes beside Seedance 2.5, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, MiniMax H3 and Wan 3.0, plus image and sound models, on one credit balance. Starter costs $10 a month ($8 billed yearly) for 900 credits, which Pika's pricing page counts as 7 five-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p (35 seconds with sound), or about 45 five-second Pika 2.5 clips by the app's estimate of about 20 credits each, with a commercial licence on every paid plan. We found no published hands-on test of the relaunched platform yet, and the tests of the earlier app disagree: Tom's Guide's Ryan Morrison judged Pika 2.0 a match for Kling, Runway and Sora in December 2024, Curious Refuge's Tyler Smith scored Pika 2.2 1.5 out of 10 in September 2025, near the bottom of Curious Refuge's benchmark, and Cybernews' Konstantinas Kofanovas, on Pika 1.5 and Turbo in a roundup last updated in February 2026, enjoyed the effects but hit high-demand warnings as a paying user. Free includes no monthly credits, plan credits do not roll over, payments are non-refundable, Pika's terms let it train its models on anonymized or aggregated content, and Trustpilot reviewers rate it 1.7 out of 5. This verdict rests on those three tests, Pika's own pages and terms, its App Store listing and Trustpilot's reviews.

Based on Pika's published plans and the hands-on tests linked below, not on a test of our own.

Good for

  • Social creators making short, eye-catching clips from a photo with effects such as Pikaffects, or adding and swapping things in existing footage
  • Trying several leading video models (Seedance 2.5, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, MiniMax H3) on one subscription and one credit balance instead of one per company
  • Marketers making quick product ads and product shots, on any paid plan, each of which includes a commercial licence

Watch out for

  • Commercial use needs a paid plan: Pika's terms limit the service to personal, non-commercial use unless your plan allows more, and the pricing and support pages give Starter, Creator and Fancy a commercial licence but not Free. Starter gained its licence between 20 and 23 October 2026.
  • What a credit buys depends on the model: on the pricing page Starter's 900 credits make 7 five-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p (122 credits each) or 27 Wan 3.0 clips (33 each), while the Pika 2.5 app estimates about 20 credits for a 5-second 720p clip. The pricing page gives costs for four example models only; each app shows its cost before you generate. Plan credits refresh every month (on annual plans too) and do not roll over, and top-up credits cost more: 60 a dollar against 90 a dollar on every plan billed monthly, by our calculation from the pricing page.
  • Free includes no monthly credits, only paid packs. Pika's pricing and support pages say every plan, Free included, exports without a watermark, but the pricing page's own plan data still lists watermarked outputs for Free, and upgrading does not remove a watermark from videos already made.
  • Subscription payments and credit packs are non-refundable, with no refund for the unused part of a billing period; cancelling keeps the plan until the period ends, then moves you to Free. Top-up credits expire 365 days after purchase. Disputes go to individual arbitration unless you opt out by email within 30 days of first registering or agreeing to the terms, whichever comes first.
  • Pika's terms let it use anonymized or aggregated content, including your inputs and outputs, to train its models under a perpetual licence, unless you have a separate written agreement such as an enterprise contract. After you delete your account, Pika will make commercially reasonable efforts to keep your content out of future training, but not out of models already trained. You keep the rights to your outputs.
  • Pika's own pages lag the relaunch: its Help Center still calls Pika 2.2 the latest model and describes a free Basic plan with 150 credits a month; old.pika.art still sells Basic, Standard, Pro and Fancy with the old credits; and the iOS app, last updated July 15, 2026, sells the old plans as in-app purchases at other prices (Standard $16 and Fancy $119 a month, Pro $35). Top-up credits cannot be used in the iOS app, the API or old.pika.art. The plans and prices on this page follow the current pricing page at pika.art/pricing.
  • We found no published hands-on test of the relaunched Pika yet: the three cited tests cover Pika 2.0, 2.2, 1.5 and Turbo on the earlier app, and they disagree, from Tom's Guide judging Pika 2.0 better than Sora to Curious Refuge's 1.5 out of 10 for Pika 2.2. Trustpilot reviewers rate Pika 1.7 out of 5 from 73 reviews, with 2026 reviews complaining of failed generations, credits running out and trouble cancelling.

What Pika does

Price

Free plan: No free monthly credits: Pika's Free plan has 0 credits a month ("packs only"), so generating needs a credit pack (from $25 for 1,500 credits, no subscription needed) or a paid plan. Free runs 2 video and 2 image or audio generations at a time and has no commercial licence. Pika's pricing and support pages say every plan, Free included, exports without a watermark, though the pricing page's plan data still lists watermarked outputs for Free. The Pika plugin for ChatGPT adds 250 credits after your first generation through it.

PlanBilled monthlyBilled yearly, per monthIncludesPrice per second of Seedance 2.5 720p video with sound
Free free free 0 credits a month ("packs only"): buy credit packs to generate; all models, 2 video and 2 image or audio generations at a time; no commercial licence, priority queue or early access –
Starter $10 $8 900 credits a month: 7 five-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p with sound (122 credits each), 27 Wan 3.0 clips at 720p (33 each), or about 45 five-second Pika 2.5 clips at 720p by the app's estimate (about 20 each); all models, no watermark, 2 video and 8 image or audio generations at a time; commercial licence; $96 a year billed yearly by our calculation $0.286
Creator $35 $28 3,150 credits a month: 25 five-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p with sound or 95 Wan 3.0 clips; commercial licence, 8 video and 32 image or audio generations at a time; $336 a year billed yearly by our calculation $0.280
Fancy $95 $76 From 8,550 credits a month at $95: 70 five-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p with sound; a slider adds credits up to $880 a month ($704 billed yearly), with its top mark at 79k credits; unlimited parallel generations, priority queue, commercial licence, and early access to new models from $440 a month $0.271
Enterprise not listed not listed Contact sales, for studios and teams: custom credits a month, all models, unlimited parallel generations, commercial licence, early access to new models and dedicated support –
Credit packs not listed not listed One-time top-ups on any plan, Free included, at 60 credits a dollar: $25 for 1,500, $50 for 3,000, $100 for 6,000, $200 for 12,000, $500 for 30,000 and $1,000 for 66,000 (10% extra); valid 365 days, for Pika on pika.art and Pika MCP only (not the API, the iOS app or old.pika.art) –
Pika API Club not listed not listed For developers: a $10 monthly membership with $10 of usage credit in the first month, then pay-as-you-go member rates for 100+ video, image, audio and language models through one API; outputs licensed for commercial use; team and enterprise plans on request –

Price per second of Seedance 2.5 720p video with sound is our calculation: the monthly-billing price divided by what the plan includes, assuming you use all of it. It is not a measured cost.

Prices last checked: 2026-10-30 on Pika's pricing page. Full breakdown: Pika pricing.

Price history

No price change since we first recorded these prices on October 20, 2026. We re-check them every week and list each change here.

What hands-on testers found

We have not tested Pika ourselves. These are the published tests we found that used it hands-on, newest first; follow the links for the full reviews.

Cybernews · Konstantinas Kofanovas · updated February 6, 2026

What they tested: Pika Labs in a roundup of AI animation generators, with the same 'life of an orange' prompt for every tool, generating with the Pika 1.5 and Turbo models on a paid plan he does not name. First published September 25, 2025, with screenshots from that month, so it covers the earlier Pika app and its old plans, before the September 2026 relaunch.

  • Pika 1.5 made a 3-second clip in about 90 seconds with a low-fi, game-like look; Turbo took about 2 minutes for 5 seconds and looked sharper, with an obvious AI sheen.
  • He got high-demand warnings even as a paying user, some projects timed out, and he expected queues and failed runs more often than on Runway or Adobe Firefly.
  • He found the effects (Melt, Explode, Squash, Inflate) the most fun part and rated Pika best for stylized, experimental animation rather than realism; at the time it offered only Pika's own models, unlike Runway.

Their score: 4 out of 5

Curious Refuge · Tyler Smith · September 29, 2025

What they tested: Pika 2.2 on the earlier Pika app, almost a year before the September 2026 relaunch, on Curious Refuge Labs' set of prompts (animated exchanges, abstract loops, faces and crowds, liquids), scored for prompt adherence, temporal consistency, visual fidelity, motion quality, and style and cinematic realism.

  • Every category scored below 2 out of 10, from prompt adherence (1.9) down to visual fidelity and cinematic realism (1.3 each), which put Pika 2.2 near the bottom of Curious Refuge's rankings.
  • Characters changed shape mid-clip and props appeared or vanished; faces, hands and hair looked stiff or smudged, and liquids such as juice poured into a glass looked synthetic, like dated computer graphics.
  • He wrote that Pika would once have topped Curious Refuge's list, but that it now seems to position itself less as a filmmaking tool and more as a fun integration for social media.

Their score: 1.5 out of 10

Tom's Guide · Ryan Morrison · December 18, 2024

What they tested: Pika 2.0, the week after its December 2024 launch, on the earlier Pika app: text-to-video and image-to-video prompts (a dog in sunglasses on a train, a cat in a spacesuit on the Moon) and Scene Ingredients built from AI-generated pictures of himself and from Midjourney and Ideogram images; his plan is not stated.

  • His dog-on-a-train prompt came back with the dog sitting still on its seat, unlike Sora and Kling, and a second shot within the five-second clip that moved in on its face; animating his Midjourney picture directly worked less well than giving it to Pika as an ingredient.
  • With an AI-generated picture of himself on a 1950s street as an ingredient, Pika made two camera moves and kept the picture's look; a picture of a Mars settler's suit, added as an ingredient, was read as a robot and given a head.
  • He judged Pika 2.0 comparable with Kling, MiniMax, Runway and Sora, and in his view better than Sora; his cat-on-the-Moon prompt as text-to-video added a second Earth, while his Ideogram picture as an ingredient came out like a film studio's ident.

What users say

Test result

toolist.ai has not run its own test of Pika; the findings above come from the published tests linked. See how we research and test.

Best text to video tools · Pika pricing

Do you make Pika? Claim this listing to correct it; it's free. To see whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend it, and how many readers we send you: toolist.ai for AI companies.

Sources