Higgsfield Recast Alternatives for Character Swap

Higgsfield Recast, Higgsfield’s character swap, replaces the person in a video with a character from one photo, but it publishes no price per clip and is not in Higgsfield’s API. The alternatives that do publish one range from $0.10 for 10 seconds on Viggle’s API to $2.80 on Runway Aleph 2.0. The model Recast runs on, Wan 2.2 Animate, is open source and free on your own GPU.

Recast’s page is titled “Character Swap”: you upload a video with the person to replace and a character image, and it moves the whole character, body included, not only the face. It runs in the browser only. Below are the tools that do the same job, priced from each vendor’s published rates on October 25, 2026 for a 10-second clip. Where there is no published rate, the table says so.

The short answer

Tool	10-second character swap	Free tier and watermark	Longest clip	API	Mac
Higgsfield Recast	Not published	Watermark on free accounts	Not published	No	Browser
Higgsfield Genjutsu object swap	$3.41 at 720p by API now, $6.81 list	3 free runs on Plus and Ultra	30 s	Yes	Browser, Jutsu Studio
Magic Hour Character Replace	$1.20 at 480p, $2.40 at 720p	3 a day, may watermark	Up to 60 s with MiniMax H3	Yes	Browser
Viggle	$0.10 by API; app rate not published	5 a day, watermark	15 s by API	Yes	iPhone app on Apple silicon Macs
Runway Aleph 2.0	$2.80 by API, $6.72 on Standard	Paid plans only	30 s	Yes	Browser
Pika Swap Anything	Not published	No watermark on any plan	Not published	No	Browser, iPhone
DomoAI Character to Video	Not published	Watermark until paid	10 s on Basic, 30 s on Pro	Yes	Browser
Wan 2.2 Animate, replace	$0.50 at 720p on Replicate; $0 on your GPU	Free, Apache 2.0	Model limit	Hosted by others	Not officially
SCAIL-2	$0 on your GPU	Free, Apache 2.0 code, MIT weights	Model limit	No	96 GB Macs, community port
Swapjutsu	About $1.71 as a 480p draft; $0 on your ComfyUI	Free and open source, no watermark	Clip by clip	MCP server	Native

What Recast costs

Higgsfield doesn’t say. Recast is not on the Higgsfield pricing page, and its own page only promises that paid plans unlock higher resolution. The only figure we found is a video test from November 2025 that reported 33 credits for a 10-second clip; at Higgsfield’s Plus price of $59 for 1,200 credits that would be about $1.62, but it is a year old and not confirmed. The app shows the cost before you generate.

Two more things decide whether Recast fits:

• Free means watermarked. Higgsfield’s help center says every generation on a free account carries a Higgsfield watermark, and that the free tier includes no credits, although the Recast page mentions daily free credits.
• No API, no MCP. Higgsfield’s API price list has 33 models and none of them is Recast or a character swap. Its MCP page promotes Genjutsu instead. If you want to automate swaps, Recast is the wrong tool.

What a Higgsfield credit is worth on each plan is in Higgsfield credits explained.

Higgsfield’s own alternative: Genjutsu

Genjutsu, launched at the end of August 2026, has an object swap mode that recasts a character as well as an object, and a motion transfer mode that keeps the camera and timing of a source and rebuilds the scene. It takes source videos of 4–30 seconds. Unlike Recast it is in the API: $0.681 a second at 720p at list price, $6.81 for 10 seconds, and Higgsfield showed it at half price on October 25, $3.41. Genjutsu Lite is cheaper and gets 10 free runs on every paid plan. The full picture is in Higgsfield Genjutsu and Genjutsu alternatives.

Hosted alternatives

Magic Hour Character Replace

Magic Hour’s Character Replace swaps a person for a character image, with three models underneath: Wan Animate by default, Kling 3.0, and MiniMax H3, which is the one that takes clips up to 60 seconds. It costs 48 credits a second at 480p and 96 at 720p. From a $10 pack of 4,000 credits, 10 seconds is $1.20 at 480p and $2.40 at 720p; packs never expire and remove the watermark. The free tool makes 3 generations a day and may add a watermark. Failed jobs are refunded. Magic Hour’s face swap is covered in Magic Hour alternatives.

Viggle

Viggle’s paid plans run from $7.99 a month (billed yearly) with no watermark and 10-minute uploads; the free plan makes 5 videos a day with a watermark. It doesn’t publish credits per clip in the app. Its API does: character replacement costs $0.01 per second of driving video, $0.10 for 10 seconds, for driving videos of 5–15 seconds. More in Viggle alternatives.

Runway Aleph 2.0

Aleph edits a video from a prompt and references. Runway listed replacing a character among the original Aleph’s edits; Aleph 2.0 takes clips up to 30 seconds at 1080p. At 28 credits a second, 10 seconds is $2.80 through the API and $6.72 on the $15 Standard plan. Details are in Runway Aleph and Act-Two alternatives.

Pika and DomoAI

Pika’s Swap Anything replaces a person or an object in a video; Pika says no plan adds a watermark, the free one included, but the tool shows its credit cost only in the app, so there is no rate to quote. DomoAI’s Character to Video replaces a character in clips of 5–10 seconds on its $9 Basic and $29 Standard plans (billed yearly) and up to 30 seconds on Pro, and says only that the cost “varies by video length”.

Open-source alternatives

Wan 2.2 Animate

Higgsfield’s own guide names Wan 2.2 as the engine behind Recast. Alibaba released Wan 2.2 Animate under Apache 2.0 in September 2025. Its replace mode puts the character into the original video, with a relighting LoRA to match the scene, and ComfyUI has a template for it. Run yourself, it costs nothing per clip but wants a large NVIDIA GPU. Hosted, replace costs $0.05 a second at 720p on Replicate, $0.50 for 10 seconds, and $0.18 a second on Alibaba Cloud in Singapore.

SCAIL-2

SCAIL-2 from zai-org animates a character from a driving video and also replaces characters, at 512p or 704p, with several reference images if needed. The code is Apache 2.0 and the weights MIT, both opened on June 9, 2026, with native ComfyUI support. A community MLX port runs on Macs with 96 GB of memory or more.

Swapjutsu, on a Mac

Swapjutsu is a free, open-source (MIT) Mac app from the makers of this site for exactly Recast’s job. It splits a swap in two. Everything that makes the swap hold together runs on the Mac and costs nothing: cuts, a mask per person, tracking, pose, depth and the control video. Only the render leaves it:

• Seedance 2.5 through Comfy, billed in Comfy credits: a 10-second 480p draft is about $1.71, without a watermark.
• Wan 2.2 Animate on your own ComfyUI, on this Mac or a PC with a GPU on your network, for nothing.

It ships an MCP server, so Claude Code or another agent can prepare and render swaps within a daily budget, which Recast can’t offer. The full walkthrough is in how to swap a character in a video.

What Swapjutsu does not do

• It runs only on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later; there is no web, Windows or phone version.
• It doesn’t use your Higgsfield credits. Rendering needs a Comfy account with credits or your own ComfyUI machine with a capable GPU.
• Preparing a clip takes time: about 3–5 seconds per second of video on an idle M4.
• Seedance drafts are 480p; the final render at 1080p costs more.
• Viggle’s API is cheaper per second than a Seedance render.

Which to pick

• Stay on Higgsfield, with an API: Genjutsu’s object swap.
• A published price in a browser: Magic Hour Character Replace, $1.20 for 10 seconds at 480p.
• Cheapest per second: Viggle’s API at $0.01.
• Prompt-driven edits on long clips: Runway Aleph 2.0.
• The same model as Recast, free: Wan 2.2 Animate on your own GPU, or SCAIL-2.
• A Mac, files on your disk, analysis done locally, agents allowed: Swapjutsu.

If you only need the face replaced, a face-swap tool is cheaper: see face swap vs character swap. If you want Seedance 2.5 rather than Wan underneath, see Seedance 2.5 character swap, and for the whole field, the best AI character swap tools in 2026.