Paintbrush vs. Sora: What to Use Now That Sora Is Shut Down

Update, October 2026: Sora is no longer available. OpenAI shut down the Sora app and website on April 26, 2026, and the Sora API on September 24, 2026. If you are looking for a replacement, read the best Sora alternatives. This page explains how Sora compared with Paintbrush and how to rebuild Sora-style work with characters that stay consistent.

What Sora was good at

Sora made a huge splash. Its single clips had photorealistic motion, cinematic lighting, and a level of coherence that raised the bar for the whole AI video space. If you needed one breathtaking shot of a dragon flying over a mountain, Sora delivered. Its integration with ChatGPT put video generation in front of millions of people, and its cameo feature made it easy to put yourself and your friends into a clip.

Where Sora fell short for stories

The problem started at clip two. Generate a second clip of the same dragon, and it was a different dragon: different proportions, different wing shape, different color. Sora had no concept of a character that persists between generations. Each clip was an island.

Sora also had no project structure for a multi-scene video: no timeline of ordered scenes, no shared library of characters and locations, and no way to turn a script into a shot list. Stories had to be assembled clip by clip in a separate editor, with the continuity managed by hand.

How Paintbrush approaches the same job

Paintbrush is built for the part Sora left to you. Each character gets a reference sheet with front, side, and back views. Each location is saved as a setting. When you @mention them in a scene, those reference images go to the video model with every generation, so scene five looks like it belongs in the same video as scene one. Extend continues a shot from its last frame when the camera should not cut.

You can also direct the whole project in a conversation. Paste a story into the creation agent, approve the character and setting previews, review the scene list and credit estimate, and generate. Characters get voices from a built-in library, and on-screen dialogue is lip-synced. Standard video runs on Kling and Pro video runs on Seedance.

Sora vs. Paintbrush at a glance

Moving a Sora project into Paintbrush

1. Gather your prompts and script. They are the most useful thing to carry over.
2. Create a project with an aspect ratio and a style that matches your old clips, such as realistic, anime, or cartoon.
3. Paste the story into the creation agent and tell it the length you want.
4. Attach stills of characters you liked. The agent can use an image as a character's identity reference, or only for style and palette.
5. Approve previews, then scenes. No scene video is generated until you approve the shot list.

If you used Sora cameos, the closest replacement is turning a photo into a character you can reuse in every scene, with permission from anyone pictured.

The bottom line

Sora was the best tool of its moment for a single stunning clip, and it is gone. For single clips today, Veo and Kling are the closest replacements. For a story where the same characters appear across many scenes, with voices, use Paintbrush.