Wan Video 2.1 icon

Wan Video 2.1

Open weights
Alibaba

Wan Video 2.1 is Alibaba's open-source video generation model combining high visual quality with controllable generation capabilities, making it one of the most capable freely available video synthesis solutions.

Text to Video
Image to Video

Key Highlights

Open Source Video Model

One of the most powerful video generation models released as fully open source, open to community development

Multiple Generation Modes

Combines multiple generation modes in a single model such as text-to-video, image-to-video, and video editing

High Resolution Support

Provides professional quality outputs with video generation at 720p and 1080p resolutions

Efficient Architecture

Efficient diffusion transformer architecture optimized to run even on consumer GPUs

About

Wan Video 2.1 is one of the most successful open-source video generation models available. Developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab research team, it produces video outputs that rival commercial closed-source models and is completely free to use. Building on the strong foundations of the original Wan Video, version 2.1 delivers notable improvements particularly in motion quality, temporal consistency, and text alignment. The model represents a milestone in the open-source video generation landscape.

The model is built on a diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture and delivers impressive results in text-to-video generation tasks. It performs high-quality video generation using a T5-XXL text encoder and 3D Causal VAE architecture. The 3D Causal VAE enables efficient processing through both spatial and temporal compression, while the Flow Matching training strategy provides more stable and predictable generation quality. It can produce videos from 480p to 720p resolution, up to 5 seconds in length. The greatest advantage of being open source is that developers can run the model on their own hardware and customize it to their specific needs and workflows.

Wan Video 2.1's motion fluidity and temporal consistency are unmatched in the open-source category. Object movement is physically convincing, and artifacts like flickering or jumping between scene transitions are minimal. Achieving strong results on VBench benchmark in overall quality, motion smoothness, and text alignment categories, the model demonstrates particularly noteworthy performance in the naturalness of human movements and the realism of environmental dynamics. The smoothness of camera movements and accurate representation of scene depth offer a quality level approaching professional video production standards. The model also has additional capabilities such as style transfer and image-to-video conversion, and this versatility makes it integrable into diverse creative workflows.

In practical use cases, Wan Video 2.1 delivers value across a wide spectrum of applications. It is effectively used in areas such as creating rapid concept videos in advertising production, scene prototyping in short film production, preparing attention-grabbing clips for social media content, and visualizing complex concepts in educational videos. It stands out as a valuable tool for product showcase videos in e-commerce, virtual tour animations in real estate, and cinematic scene design in game development. The model's ability to be customized through community-developed LoRA fine-tunes enables the creation of specialized video generation pipelines focused on specific styles or subject domains.

Downloadable from Hugging Face and ModelScope, the model can be run on a single consumer GPU such as NVIDIA RTX 4090. Advanced workflows can be built through ComfyUI integration, and complex video generation processes can be managed through visual node-based pipeline design. It is also available as an API through Tencent Cloud and other cloud platforms. Ongoing development work by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab aims to add higher resolution, longer video duration, and enhanced control mechanisms in future versions of the model. Offering a cost-effective, high-quality video generation solution for both researchers and content creators, Wan Video 2.1 continues to be one of the most valuable projects in the open-source AI ecosystem.

Use Cases

1

Community Video Projects

Video generation projects customizable by researchers and developers thanks to its open-source nature

2

Content Creation

Producing creative video content from text or image input for social media and digital platforms

3

Research and Development

Usage as a base model for researching and testing new approaches in video generation technologies

4

Product Animations

Transforming static product images into lively and impressive promotional animations

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Fully open source under Apache 2.0 license — suitable for commercial use
  • Runs on 8GB VRAM — accessible on consumer GPUs
  • Text-to-video, image-to-video, and video editing in single framework
  • Benchmark leader among open-source models — compared with Sora
  • Video generation up to 1080p resolution

Cons

  • 1.3B model limited to 480p — 14B model needed for high quality
  • 14B model takes ~4 minutes for 5-second video on RTX 4090
  • Artifacts may appear in human faces and hands
  • Audio generation not yet supported

Technical Details

Parameters

14B

Architecture

Diffusion Transformer

Training Data

Proprietary video dataset

License

Apache 2.0

Features

  • Open Source
  • Text-to-Video
  • Image-to-Video
  • Video Editing
  • Multi-Resolution
  • Consumer GPU Support

Benchmark Results

MetricValueCompared ToSource
Max Çözünürlük1280x720 (720p)CogVideoX: 720pWan Video GitHub / Hugging Face
Parametre Sayısı14B (T2V), 1.3B (I2V)CogVideoX: 5BHugging Face Model Card
Max Kare Sayısı81 frames (~5s @ 16fps)—Wan Video GitHub
FVD Score (UCF-101)285CogVideoX: 303Papers With Code

Available Platforms

HuggingFace
GitHub
Replicate

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Models

AnimateDiff icon

AnimateDiff

Yuwei Guo|N/A

AnimateDiff is a motion module framework developed by Yuwei Guo that transforms any personalized text-to-image diffusion model into a video generator by inserting learnable temporal attention layers into the existing architecture. Released in July 2023, AnimateDiff introduced a groundbreaking approach by decoupling motion learning from visual appearance learning, allowing users to leverage the vast ecosystem of fine-tuned Stable Diffusion models and LoRA adaptations for video creation without retraining. The core innovation is a plug-and-play motion module that learns general motion patterns from video data and can be inserted into any Stable Diffusion checkpoint to animate its outputs while preserving visual style and quality. The motion module consists of temporal transformer blocks with self-attention across frames, generating temporally coherent sequences with natural object movement. AnimateDiff supports both SD 1.5 and SDXL base models with optimized motion module versions for each architecture. The framework enables generation of animated GIFs and short video loops with customizable frame counts, frame rates, and motion intensities. Users can combine AnimateDiff with ControlNet for pose-guided animation, IP-Adapter for reference-based motion, and various LoRA models for style-specific video generation. Common applications include animated artwork, social media content, game asset animation, product visualization, and creative storytelling. Available under the Apache 2.0 license, AnimateDiff is accessible on Hugging Face, Replicate, and fal.ai, with extensive community support through ComfyUI workflows and Automatic1111 extensions. The framework has become one of the most influential open-source video generation approaches, enabling creators to produce stylized animated content with unprecedented flexibility.

Open weights
CogVideoX icon

CogVideoX

Tsinghua & ZhipuAI|5B

CogVideoX is an open-source video generation model jointly developed by Tsinghua University and ZhipuAI that utilizes an expert transformer architecture to produce high-quality videos from text descriptions. Released in August 2024, CogVideoX represents a significant advancement in open-source video generation, offering capabilities that approach proprietary models while remaining freely available for research. Built on a 5 billion parameter transformer architecture that processes text and visual tokens through specialized expert layers, it enables efficient computation while maintaining high output quality. CogVideoX employs a 3D causal VAE for video encoding and decoding, capturing both spatial and temporal information in a unified latent space, resulting in videos with smooth motion transitions and consistent visual coherence. The model supports variable-length video generation and multiple resolution outputs, providing flexibility for different use cases. CogVideoX demonstrates strong performance in generating videos with accurate motion dynamics, scene transitions, and visual storytelling elements, handling both simple prompts and complex narrative scenarios. The training approach incorporates progressive resolution scaling and temporal consistency losses that maintain stable generation quality across different durations. Available under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, CogVideoX can be accessed through fal.ai and Replicate, and can be run locally with sufficient GPU resources. The model has been well-received in the research community as a strong open-source baseline for video generation, enabling academic studies and commercial applications that require transparent, modifiable video generation capabilities without proprietary API constraints.

Open weights
CogVideoX-5B icon

CogVideoX-5B

Tsinghua & ZhipuAI|5B

CogVideoX-5B is a 5-billion parameter open-source video generation model developed jointly by Tsinghua University and ZhipuAI that produces high-quality, temporally consistent videos from text descriptions and image inputs. Built on a 3D VAE (Variational Autoencoder) combined with a Diffusion Transformer architecture, CogVideoX-5B processes spatial and temporal dimensions jointly, enabling the generation of videos with smooth motion, consistent object appearances, and coherent scene dynamics across frames. The model supports both text-to-video generation where users describe desired scenes in natural language and image-to-video generation where a static image serves as the first frame and the model animates it with appropriate motion. CogVideoX-5B can generate videos of up to 6 seconds at 480x720 resolution with 8 frames per second, producing content suitable for social media clips, concept visualization, and creative prototyping. The 3D VAE compresses video data into a compact latent space that preserves temporal coherence, while the Diffusion Transformer generates content with strong semantic understanding of motion, physics, and spatial relationships. As one of the most capable open-source video generation models available, CogVideoX-5B achieves competitive quality with proprietary alternatives while remaining freely accessible for research and development. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, the model is available on Hugging Face and integrates with the Diffusers library for straightforward deployment. Key applications include generating short-form video content, creating animated product demonstrations, producing visual concept previews for film and advertising pre-production, and prototyping motion graphics without manual animation.

Open weights
Gemini Omni Flash icon

Gemini Omni Flash

Status unknown
Google DeepMind|undisclosed

Gemini Omni Flash is Google DeepMind's groundbreaking multimodal AI model that generates physics-aware video with synchronized audio from any combination of text, images, video, and audio inputs. Announced at Google I/O 2026, it represents a paradigm shift from traditional text-to-video models by enabling conversational, iterative video editing — users can refine scenes through natural language without regenerating from scratch. The model maintains character consistency and scene memory across multiple editing rounds, preserves identity and voice throughout sequences, and understands real-world physics including gravity, collisions, and material properties. Omni Flash supports cinematic camera controls (dolly zoom, over-shoulder shots, tracking), accurate text rendering with word-by-word animation, multi-input synthesis (combining videos, images, audio, and storyboards), and style transfer across artistic mediums including anime, claymation, and watercolor. Built on Gemini's training data, it carries significantly more world knowledge than standalone video models like Veo, enabling it to visualize complex concepts from quantum computing to historical events without exhaustive prompting. Available through the Gemini app, Google Flow, and Google AI Studio, it produces clips up to 10 seconds with invisible SynthID watermarking for content authenticity.

Proprietary

Quick Info

Parameters14B
TypeDiffusion Transformer
LicenseApache 2.0
Released2025-02
Architecture

Diffusion Transformer

Version2.1
CreatorAlibaba

Links

Tags

open-source
video
alibaba
wan
Visit Website

Explore More