WAN Video

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Alibaba open-source WAN 2.1 video generation model with 14B parameters - Apache 2.0 licensed, self-hostable on 24GB VRAM for text and image-to-video.

WAN (Wan2.1) is an open-source video generation model developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab and released in January 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license. With 14 billion parameters, WAN generates 720p text-to-video clips from natural language descriptions and animates reference images into video clips with consistent visual appearance. At release, WAN's scores on EvalCrafter and VBench placed it competitively alongside commercial tools including Runway Gen-3 and Kling. The model runs on consumer GPUs with at least 24GB VRAM and integrates with ComfyUI for visual node-based workflow scripting. Alibaba also provides hosted cloud inference on the Tongyi platform for users without local GPU hardware.

#video-generation

#open-source

#text-to-video

#image-to-video

#ai-video

#free

Free

Completely free to use

Update Tool

github.com

Free

Pricing Model

Video & Audio

Key Features

Text-to-video generation producing 720p clips from English and Chinese natural language descriptions
Image-to-video animation adds temporal motion to a reference image while preserving its visual content and style
Apache 2.0 license permits unrestricted commercial use, fine-tuning, and redistribution without royalty obligations
14B parameter architecture with benchmark scores competitive against commercial tools including Runway and Kling at launch
ComfyUI integration provides a visual node-based workflow editor for video generation pipelines without writing code
Runs locally on consumer GPUs with 24GB VRAM using the official diffusers-based inference code from Hugging Face
Hosted cloud inference available on Alibaba Tongyi platform and Hugging Face Spaces for users without local GPU access

Use Cases

Developers integrating video generation into commercial products without ongoing per-video API fees via self-hosted deployment
AI researchers fine-tuning WAN on proprietary video datasets as a high-quality open-weight base model
Content creators generating social media video clips locally for complete privacy without uploading footage to cloud servers
Companies needing an Apache 2.0 video model they can modify, fine-tune, and deploy on air-gapped on-premises infrastructure

Pros

Apache 2.0 license permits fine-tuning and commercial redistribution without royalties or licensing restrictions of any kind
Benchmark quality competitive with commercial tools at launch - closes the open vs closed quality gap meaningfully
ComfyUI node integration makes WAN accessible to visual creators without Python scripting or terminal knowledge

Cons

24GB VRAM minimum excludes most consumer laptops and cloud CPU instances from running the model locally
English prompt understanding can be inconsistent compared to Runway or Kling, which train on more English-heavy datasets
Alibaba Tongyi hosted platform has a Chinese-language interface, limiting discoverability and usability for Western developers