European alternatives to Sora

Sora was OpenAI’s text-to-video product, generating short clips from text prompts and image inputs and extending existing clips. The first generation reached ChatGPT Plus and Pro users in the United States and Canada in December 2024. Sora 2, released to selected users at the end of September 2025, added a TikTok-style social feed and became briefly the most-downloaded app in the US App Store.

OpenAI announced the discontinuation on X on 24 March 2026. The app shut down on 26 April 2026 and the API on 24 September 2026, ending the brand; OpenAI’s Disney licensing agreement wound down alongside it. No specific reason was given in the shutdown notice, though reporting linked the decision to compute shortages and running costs estimated at around USD 1 million a day against a user base that had peaked near a million and then fallen below 500,000. The Register labelled OpenAI a “product-killer” over the decision.

The entry is kept because readers still search for Sora alternatives in volume. For generated scenes from a prompt there is no European equivalent — the field is Google, Runway and a wall of Chinese models. For the adjacent job of putting a scripted presenter on screen, the European options below are real, and HeyGen is the live incumbent they actually substitute for.