Protoface vs. Spatius

Two affordable approaches to real-time AI avatars

Protoface and Spatius both make real-time AI avatars accessible at prices well below many premium platforms. The key difference is architectural: Protoface converts an agent’s audio into finished avatar video, while Spatius sends motion data to its AvatarKit SDK for local rendering on the user’s device.

Quality and setup

Protoface is built for teams that want to add a realistic face to an existing voice agent without maintaining a client-side renderer. It creates custom avatars from a single image in seconds, integrates with popular voice-agent platforms, and advertises sub-300-millisecond latency with a setup process of about five minutes.

Spatius prioritizes on-device efficiency. AvatarKit renders its 3D Gaussian Splatting avatars locally across web, iOS, and Android, making it well suited to mobile apps, kiosks, embedded systems, and low-bandwidth deployments. This approach requires more client-side integration, device testing, and long-term local SDK maintenance. Spatius says custom avatars can be generated from a single image in around three hours, but at a high cost.

Protoface allows API-based generation of custom avatars based on a single image, with generation times often under 10 seconds. As of publication, Spatius requires a $25 payment per custom avatar with a longer lead time, most likely due to Spatius's older Gaussian-based approach.

Cost and scalability

Spatius and Protoface have comparable per-minute rates, slightly under 1 cent a minute for Spatius and exactly 1 cent a minute for Protoface at scale.

At $299 per month, Protoface includes 25,000 minutes, 50 concurrent sessions, and up to 1,000 custom-avatar IDs. At this tier, Protoface provides greater concurrency, rapid avatar creation, and no client-side rendering work or ongoing maintenance headaches.

Which platform is the better fit?

Protoface is the stronger fit for teams that want finished avatar video, fast custom-avatar creation, broad voice-agent integrations, and a simpler path to production. It is especially practical for web-based voice agents and products that need to generate many custom faces quickly.

Spatius could be an alternative when low bandwidth or on-device rendering is the priority. It may be a better alternative for a large developer team, given that the devices would have to host the client rendering stack, which would require a larger team for long-term maintenance and device support (for example, when Spatius revises local SDK versions up).

Overall, Protoface offers a more practical balance of speed, simplicity, and scale for teams that want managed avatar video, while Spatius may be useful for products that prioritize on-device rendering with a team size that can handle ongoing maintenance of local packages.