Seven honest Plainly alternatives for automated video, from After Effects rendering platforms to developer APIs, with who each suits and what it costs.
Nubu Team··12 minute read
Plainly is a well-established way to automate video: upload After Effects templates, connect a data source, and it renders the variations in the cloud, creating what its homepage calls "data-driven videos on autopilot". It has a developer-friendly API, a template gallery, several years of track record, an Adobe "Video Technology Partner" badge, and case studies including WPP Production, UNICEF Australia and Leads.io. If that model matches how you work, it is a genuinely good choice, and it keeps an entry in this list on merit.
But rendering variations is one job in a longer chain, and the reasons people search for Plainly alternatives are usually structural rather than complaints about quality. In practice it comes down to four situations: the render-minute pricing model does not match your team shape, you need review and delivery workflow around the render rather than just the render, you would rather own the infrastructure than rent a platform, or you do not need After Effects fidelity at all and a programmatic API would serve you better. This guide covers the honest field across all four.
One disclosure before the list: Nubu is our product. It leads the list because this is our blog, not because everything else ranks below it, and every entry states plainly who it is for, including the entry where the right answer is staying with Plainly.
Nubu is creative automation for teams, built around real After Effects rendering. You upload the .aep templates you already own as packages (how templates work), then build campaigns on a node canvas: CSV datasets up to 5,000 rows and 40 columns, If/Else nodes that route rows down different branches, auto-pairing that wires generated variants together from the data itself, and live diagnostics that surface problems while you build rather than at render time (flows overview). One build produces up to 5,000 creatives, with the same flow and data always giving the same set, and every render runs through genuine After Effects in the cloud, so what ships is what your motion designer actually built.
The reason to pick Nubu over a pure render engine is everything around the render. Builds land in a review state, teammates comment with @mentions on individual creatives, roles control who may approve, and approval is what queues the render. On the Business+ plan, finished ads push directly into Meta as paused ads, and into Google Ads as paused Demand Gen ads and paused Performance Max asset groups, so nothing ever goes live without a human (connecting Meta, connecting Google Ads). Business+ also carries the AI layer: Gemini image generation and Veo 3.1 video generation using your own provider keys, plus per-market brand glossaries, with tone rules and approved and forbidden terms, that drive AI translation for multi-market campaigns. Every download ships as a ZIP with a media-buyer manifest CSV listing file names, placements, all ad copy and UTMs, and flows are live multi-user with presence and conflict-safe editing.
Who it is for: in-house performance teams and studios where more than one person touches a campaign, and where "approved" and "delivered" matter as much as "rendered".
Standout strengths: the node-based flow editor with live diagnostics, review and approval with comments and roles, paused-ad delivery into Meta and Google Ads, brand glossaries for multi-market work, the media-buyer manifest, live collaboration.
Honest limits: no public API, delivery covers Meta and Google Ads only, and the AI features sit on the top tier with bring-your-own provider keys.
Cost shape: per-seat, in GBP with VAT included. Free at £0 (one member, 10 GB), Starter at £29 per month plus £12 per seat, Pro at £79 plus £24 per seat, Business+ at £199 plus £39 per seat with unlimited members. Yearly billing saves 20%, and the free trial needs no credit card. Full numbers are on the pricing page, and the direct head-to-head lives at Nubu vs Plainly.
nexrender is the open source route: a render engine and job system for After Effects automation that you run on your own machines. If your team has developers and would rather own the pipeline than rent one, this is the obvious starting point, and the self-hosted version costs nothing but your time.
That time is the real price. Self-hosting means provisioning render machines with After Effects installed, and owning queueing, storage, retries and monitoring yourself, which is precisely the operational load the managed platforms in this list charge to take away. For teams with unusual requirements, that control is the point: nothing about your pipeline is someone else's product decision. There is also a managed cloud offering, listed from €99 per month plus €0.18 per render minute, for teams who want the nexrender model without babysitting servers.
Who it is for: developer teams with the appetite to run render infrastructure, and anyone whose requirements are unusual enough that owning the stack beats configuring somebody else's.
Standout strengths: free and open source, fully scriptable, no platform lock-in, complete control over data and hardware.
Cost shape: free self-hosted, on your own hardware and After Effects licences; cloud from €99 per month plus €0.18 per render minute, as listed on their site.
Templater is the desktop veteran of this space: an After Effects plugin that batches versions from spreadsheets on your own machine, and for years the standard answer in studio pipelines before cloud platforms existed. There is no cloud dependency at all. Your project, your data and your renders never leave the building, which some studios treat as a hard requirement rather than a limitation.
The flip side is that it scales with your hardware and your operators. Batch renders occupy your machines while they run, and collaboration, review and delivery are whatever your studio already uses around it. If your bottleneck is versioning inside After Effects rather than workflow around it, that trade is a perfectly rational one.
Who it is for: studios and production teams who live inside After Effects, want data-driven versioning without a cloud platform, and have the machines to render on.
Standout strengths: deep AE-native batching, full local control, a long-established position in studio workflows.
Cost shape: licensed desktop software; current pricing is on their site.
Creatomate is a different species from everything above: a developer API for programmatic video that renders from JSON templates rather than After Effects projects. That distinction cuts both ways and deserves to be stated clearly. You give up the After Effects fidelity ceiling, which matters if your brand's motion language is built in AE and your existing templates are .aep files, because those do not carry over. You gain an API-first workflow with a large template and tutorial ecosystem, quick starts for common formats, and no After Effects dependency anywhere in the chain.
Who it is for: product and growth teams generating social clips, product videos and personalised promos from code, where the design requirements fit a web-rendered model.
Standout strengths: JSON-driven rendering, an extensive template and tutorial ecosystem, developer ergonomics.
Cost shape: self-serve API plans, published on their site.
Shotstack sits in the same category as Creatomate: a cloud video editing API driven by a JSON timeline, aimed squarely at developers embedding video generation inside applications. The same honest trade applies. It is not After Effects, so existing .aep templates do not carry over and the fidelity ceiling is different, but if your video is born programmatic, generated inside a product rather than designed in a motion suite, that ceiling may never matter to you.
Who it is for: engineering teams building video features into products, and media automation at application scale.
Standout strengths: a clean JSON timeline model, a large documentation and tutorial ecosystem, built for embedding.
Cost shape: self-serve API plans, published on their site.
A fair list includes the incumbent, because sometimes the correct alternative to Plainly is Plainly.
Stay if the core model fits: upload After Effects templates, connect a data source, render variations in the cloud, with a developer-friendly video editing API and JSON-to-video when you want renders triggered from code. The supporting evidence is genuinely strong. Plainly has years of content behind it and around fourteen solution pages, a template gallery plus an After Effects expressions library, an Adobe "Video Technology Partner" badge, and case studies including WPP Production, UNICEF Australia and Leads.io. Pricing, as listed on their pricing page, runs from Starter at $69 per month with 50 render minutes through Explorer at $134, Team at $259, Pro at $649 and Unlimited at $1,500+, with a custom Enterprise tier, metered by render minutes. There is a 14-day free trial, and a 60-day money-back offer appears on their comparison pages.
The metered model is the key fit question. For a solo motion designer, or a small shop with low headcount and high burst volume, paying by render minutes rather than by teammate is the right shape, and it is the honest reason Plainly wins that profile in our own head-to-head comparison.
Who it is for: developers who want an API-shaped render service, and solo motion designers or low-headcount, high-volume shops whose economics suit render-minute metering.
Standout strengths: the API, maturity and track record, the template gallery, metered pricing for small high-volume teams.
Cost shape: $69 to $1,500+ per month as listed, metered by render minutes, plus a custom Enterprise tier.
Mark this one clearly: Idomoo is enterprise software, and it belongs to a different conversation from everything above. It specialises in personalised video at very large scale, the one-video-per-customer pattern, for large organisations with the volumes, data pipelines and budgets to match. If you are comparing $69 and £29 starting tiers, this is not your bracket; if you are a large organisation planning millions of individually personalised videos, it is a name you will meet in every evaluation.
Who it is for: enterprises producing personalised one-to-one video at scale, with procurement processes to match.
Standout strengths: personalised video as the core competency, enterprise scale.
Cost shape: enterprise; expect a sales conversation rather than a sign-up form.
Strip the branding away and the choice usually collapses into four questions.
Do you need After Effects fidelity? If your templates are .aep files and the motion design matters, the field narrows to Nubu, Plainly, nexrender and Templater. If not, Creatomate and Shotstack open up. New to the AE side? Start with our After Effects automation guide.
Do you need an API? Plainly, Creatomate, Shotstack and nexrender are built for code. Nubu has no public API and is built for teams working inside the product.
Who is the bill shaped for? Render-minute metering (Plainly, nexrender's cloud) suits solo and low-headcount, high-volume work. Per-seat pricing (Nubu) suits teams with steady output. Self-hosting (nexrender, Templater) suits owners of hardware and their own time.
Does the job end at the render? If review, approval, brand control and getting paused ads into Meta and Google Ads are part of the work, that is the workflow Nubu was built around. The wider pattern is covered in our explainer on what creative advertising automation is.
And the honest closing note: most tools here have free trials, including a 14-day one at Plainly and a no-credit-card one at Nubu. Nothing in this article substitutes for uploading your own template, running your own data through it, and watching where the friction actually shows up. Nubu's full capability list is on the features page, and if you have narrowed it to the two AE platforms, the detailed comparison is at Nubu vs Plainly.
