I’ve been testing out every major open-source video model, and Wan 2.1 blows past all of them. While companies race to match OpenAI’s Sora, Alibaba quietly built something that actually works on normal hardware.
First off, Wan 2.1 runs 2.5x faster than other models. You can generate a 5-second 480P video in about 4 minutes on an RTX 4090. That’s huge for anyone doing real video work. And if you need something even more accessible, their smaller T2V-1.3B variant requires only 8.19GB of video memory.
The quality stands out too. Most AI video models struggle with basic motion, but Wan 2.1 handles it smoothly at both 480P and 720P. The spatio-temporal VAE architecture they built makes a clear difference in output quality.
Comparing it to Google’s Veo 2, which I now have access to through VideoFX – Veo 2 does produce slightly better results, but at 3X the cost. For most practical applications, the difference in quality doesn’t justify the price gap.
What impresses me most is how practical they made it. You can use it for text-to-video, image-to-video, editing, and even video-to-audio tasks. And unlike many AI releases, this isn’t just a demo – it’s fully open source.
Of course, this fits into Alibaba’s bigger $52 billion AI investment plan. But beyond the corporate strategy, they’ve created something genuinely useful for creators and developers.
If you want to see how different video models stack up, check out my comparison of text-free video generation approaches here: https://adam.holter.com/ai-models-compared-best-practices-for-text-free-image-generation/
I predict we’ll see a lot more developers building on Wan 2.1’s foundation. The combination of speed, quality, and accessibility makes it the clear leader in open source video AI right now.
