Wan 2.1
Open-source video generation model suite by Alibaba with text-to-video and image-to-video.
About
Alibaba's Wan 2.1 established the Wan line as one of the leading open video generation suites. It spans several diffusion transformer models: text-to-video in 1.3B and 14B parameter sizes at 480p and 720p, a 14B image-to-video model, a first-and-last-frame-to-video variant, VACE models for video editing and creation, and text-to-image, with the notable ability to render legible Chinese and English text inside generated footage. Underpinning the suite is Wan-VAE, a 3D causal variational autoencoder that encodes and decodes 1080p video of arbitrary length while preserving temporal information. The 1.3B text-to-video model needs only about 8 GB of VRAM, putting local generation within reach of consumer cards like the RTX 4090. Everything is open source under Apache 2.0, with weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope, inference code and Gradio demos in the repository, and integrations in Diffusers and ComfyUI. Researchers and creators run it for self-hosted video generation without usage restrictions, and Wan 2.2 continues the series.
Should you use Wan 2.1?
Pick it when
Pick Wan 2.1 when you want the broadest open suite under Apache-2.0: a 1.3B text-to-video model in about 8 GB, 14B models for 720p, image-to-video, first-and-last-frame control, VACE editing, and legible on-screen text.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need synchronized audio (LTX-2.5 or Ovi) or clips much longer than about five seconds (FramePack, SkyReels-V2, LongCat-Video). Running the 14B models on a modest card is easier through WanGP's quantized builds.
Alternatives to Wan 2.1
- WanGP
Runs Wan alongside Hunyuan and LTX on 6 GB cards with quantized builds and a queueing web UI, but its license bars reselling or hosted services.
- LTX-Video
Distilled variants need as few as 8 steps and run faster than real time on an H100, but weights use Lightricks' community license, not Apache-2.0.
- FastVideo
Ships distilled FastWan versions of Wan for faster-than-real-time short clips, worth it when generation speed matters more than the full model lineup.
- HunyuanVideo
13B model with a multimodal LLM text encoder and 129-frame clips, but it needs far more memory and uses Tencent's community license.
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Details
- Category
- Video Generation
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Advanced (4/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Minimum VRAM
- 12 GB
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026
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