Lumen5
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveTurns articles and scripts into branded social videos
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $19/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Four self-serve tiers, one seat each: Free (720p, Lumen5 branding, 2 AI voice minutes a month), Basic $29/month or $19/month billed yearly ($228/year, 720p, no branding, 20 voice minutes), Starter $79/month or $59/month billed yearly ($708/year, 1080p, Getty media), Pro $199/month or $149/month billed yearly ($1,788/year, 3 brand kits, custom watermark and fonts, Shutterstock). Team is annual only at $3,828/year for 3 seats. Prices load from an API in the browser rather than the page HTML.
Use tool ↗About Lumen5
Lumen5 splits a blog post, script or document into scenes and matches each one with licensed stock footage, on-screen captions, music and an AI voiceover to assemble a short social or internal video, with a script generator for starting from a brief. Brand kits pin fonts, colours, logos and a persistent watermark so a marketing team gets consistent output across contributors; higher plans add voice cloning, video translation, Getty and Shutterstock libraries and custom branded templates. The free tier renders at 720p with Lumen5 branding, paid plans start at $29 a month, and the company has run the product from Vancouver since 2017.
- Platforms
- Web
- API
- Not confirmed
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Plan API behind the pricing page: Free $0 (720p, branding on), Basic $29/month or $228/year, Starter $79/month or $708/year (1080p), Pro $199/month or $1,788/year, Team $3,828/year with 3 seats; the page displays yearly plans as a monthly figure billed yearly (15 October 2026)lumen5.com ↗
- Pricing page FAQ: Basic and Starter aimed at individual creators, Pro at small businesses; voice cloning from Starter up, video translation on all paid plans, brand kits and font uploads on Starter and Pro, bespoke templates on Team (15 October 2026)lumen5.com ↗
- Site config in the page source gives the company address as 801-750 W Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6C 1G8 (15 October 2026)lumen5.com ↗
- Founded 2017 in Vancouver by Michael Cheng and co-foundersbcbusiness.ca ↗
Is Lumen5 legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Nov 3, 2016 (9 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar NameCheap, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Google Trust Services, valid until Dec 7, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2017The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Lumen5, CanadaOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Lumen5
A content-repurposing machine, not a video editor: it is best when you already have written material and need twenty passable videos a month, worst when you want one video that looks authored. Buy it for volume and brand consistency, not for craft.
Pros
- Brand kits genuinely enforce consistency, which most text-to-video rivals do poorly
- Text-to-scene splitting saves the tedious storyboard step on long articles
- Free tier is usable for evaluating the workflow end to end
- Nine years of operation and DAM integrations make it a safer procurement choice than newer tools
Cons
- Stock-footage matching often needs manual replacement to avoid generic visuals
- Older, template-driven approach compared with generative video tools that render original shots
- Any API access is enterprise-side and not documented for self-serve users
- Pricing page renders only in-browser, so plan costs are hard to compare before signing up
Best for
- Content marketing teams recycling a blog backlog into LinkedIn and Instagram clips
- L&D and internal comms teams turning documents into explainer videos
- Agencies producing repeatable social output for multiple clients under brand kits
Not for
- Anyone who needs frame-level editing, keyframes or real motion design
- Creators wanting AI-generated footage rather than stock library matches
- Developers wanting to script video generation programmatically on a self-serve plan
Watch out: The Free tier stamps Lumen5 branding on the video and caps rendering at 720p, so nothing made on it is client-deliverable; 1080p starts at the $79 Starter plan.
Alternatives to Lumen5
Lumen5 head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.