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TwelveLabs vs Vivu

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Free plan
TwelveLabs has one; Vivu prices on request
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
TwelveLabs — 89 vs 82 for Vivu
Best fit
TwelveLabs: Developers building search over large video archives · Vivu: Companies with large unindexed video libraries wanting to expose them to AI agents
Status
Both up at our last check (Oct 15, 2026)

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

TwelveLabsAPIs for video understanding — search, embed and analyze footage with the Marengo and Pegasus modelsVivuTurns a company's video library into a queryable context source AI agents can pull from via API or MCP.

Side by side

FactTwelveLabsVivu
CategoryVideo Analysis & SearchVideo Analysis & Search
Pricing modelFreemiumContact
Starts at$29/mo—
Public APIYesYes
Trust score89 / 10082 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyTwelveLabs, Inc.Vivu Inc.
Launched2021—
Last verifiedOct 15, 2026Oct 15, 2026

What our research says

TwelveLabs

Still the most direct way to add real video search and Q&A to a product without training multimodal models yourself. Pricing has moved from per-minute metering to plans that bundle storage with a monthly workload allowance, which makes a prototype's cost predictable, but a large archive outgrows Plus quickly and only Pro can buy overage.

Pros

  • Purpose-built video models rather than frame-sampled image models
  • A free plan and self-serve $29 and $99 tiers make prototype costs predictable
  • Re-indexing for new model releases is included in the monthly fee
  • SDKs and a playground support evaluation before committing
  • Analyze handles continuous reasoning over long footage

Cons

  • Storage and workload allowances are separate, and Free and Plus stop at their caps with no overage
  • It is infrastructure, not a turnkey app - integration takes engineering
  • Large archives push quickly into Pro overage or an enterprise contract

Vivu

Vivu addresses a specific infrastructure gap -- making a company's existing video footage queryable by AI agents the same way text documents already are -- rather than building another consumer video tool. It's early enough that there's no self-serve product or public pricing yet, so evaluating it means booking a demo rather than testing it directly.

Pros

  • Team background in video AI at scale (cited prior work reaching 10M+ users, 100M+ hours of video)
  • Offers both a direct API and an MCP server for agent integration
  • Targets a concrete, underserved problem (video as agent context) rather than a crowded consumer category

Cons

  • No public pricing or self-serve access
  • No named customers or case studies visible on the site
  • Early-stage product with limited independent verification of claims

Which one fits

Choose TwelveLabs if you need

  • Developers building search over large video archives
  • Media and sports teams automating highlights and logging
  • Products that need video Q&A or summarization via API

Choose Vivu if you need

  • Companies with large unindexed video libraries wanting to expose them to AI agents
  • Teams already building on MCP who want video as an additional context source
  • Robotics or support teams whose institutional knowledge lives in recorded video

TwelveLabs vs Vivu: the questions people ask

Is TwelveLabs cheaper than Vivu?

TwelveLabs starts at $29/mo; Vivu prices on request, so a quote is the only way to compare.

Does TwelveLabs or Vivu have a free tier?

TwelveLabs has a free tier; Vivu prices on request.

Which has a public API, TwelveLabs or Vivu?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

More comparisons

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