14 best After Effects alternatives (free and paid)

The closest After Effects alternatives are DaVinci Resolve’s Fusion page and Blender if you want free desktop software, Apple Motion, Fusion Studio or Nuke if you are willing to pay, and Jitter, Rive or Lottielab if the animation has to run on a website or inside an app. None of them is a straight copy, and your After Effects templates and plugins won’t come along, so pick by what you have to deliver.

With any new app, I check what file it can hand to the next person well before I look at the price. At Moonb I open a lot of the project files clients send over, and these days they come out of a long list of apps. A Resolve timeline with Fusion comps tucked inside is normal now, and so is the odd Lottie file some product team exported from a browser tool.

Price, platform and Lottie export for each tool

All prices are in US dollars, from each maker’s own pricing or product page in October 2026.

There is no free version of After Effects

Adobe doesn’t make one. The closest thing on its plans page is a seven-day trial of the full app, which turns into a paid Creative Cloud membership unless you cancel, and anyone who wants a free online video editor gets pointed to Adobe Express. Bought by itself, After Effects is US$22.99 a month on the annual, billed monthly option. Adobe sells it only through Creative Cloud, paid monthly or annually, so there is no one-time license to buy (Adobe’s After Effects plans page).

If the monthly bill is why you’re looking, every app in the first group below is free. Several browser tools have usable free tiers too, and even Nuke, the most expensive thing on this list, has a free non-commercial edition for learning.

Free After Effects alternatives

Resolve and Blender are full production suites. The other three are smaller desktop apps built around motion design, Glaxnimate most of all.

1. DaVinci Resolve

Resolve is the free tool I’d try first. The editor alone tops my video editing software roundup, ahead of fifteen other editors, and the Fusion page inside it handles most of the compositing, tracking, keying and titling people do in After Effects, with no export step between the cut and the effects. The node graph is the hard part. Coming from stacked layers, your first few Fusion comps feel clumsy, and then at some point the wiring starts to read like a map of the shot.

2. Blender

Learn Blender before you pay for a 3D plugin. After Effects now has its own 3D workspace and imports 3D models, but extruded type, product turntables and a logo tracked into a handheld shot all get easier in Blender, which does them for free, along with a camera that moves through an actual scene. The climb is steep for anyone who only knows layers, since almost everything happens in 3D space.

In Blender’s official 5.2 LTS overview, I’d watch the Grease Pencil, animation and rigging, and compositing chapters first.

3. Cavalry

My favorite on the list. If you have ever written a wall of expressions, or hand-set dozens of keyframes, just to get a grid of shapes moving slightly out of sync, Cavalry’s duplicators, falloffs and connections do that work for you. You set up rules and Cavalry works out the motion from them, which takes some getting used to after years of keyframing by hand. It also exports Lottie, so for motion that has to live inside a product it’s the free tool I’d reach for.

One layer driving another, nulls, noise, stagger and falloffs all come up in Cavalry’s getting-started tutorial on animation systems.

4. Maxon Autograph

Image: Maxon, Autograph product page

Of the free apps, Autograph is the one an After Effects user will recognize fastest. Titles, logo animation, compositing and transitions work the way you’d expect, and the 3D sits in the same timeline. There’s far less around it, though, with fewer tutorials and even fewer templates, so I’d leave slack in the schedule of the first job you try it on.

5. Glaxnimate

Image: Glaxnimate screenshot from glaxnimate.org

Glaxnimate is small on purpose. It handles shape layers, trim paths and simple keyframed vector motion, and leaves footage and 3D alone. For a stock loader, grabbing one from a free Lottie animation site is quicker than drawing it, so I’d save Glaxnimate for animation that has to be your own.

Paid After Effects alternatives

Prices here run from a one-time $49.99 for Motion to thousands a year for Nuke.

6. Apple Motion

I’d only buy Motion for a team that already cuts in Final Cut Pro, since most of its value is in how the two talk to each other. In that kind of edit suite it handles titles, lower thirds, callouts, simple logo moves and quick effects, and behaviors do a lot of the animating.

7. Blackmagic Fusion Studio

Think of it as the Fusion page without Resolve wrapped around it, made for compositors and VFX artists who never want to see an edit timeline. Most people should start with the Fusion page in free Resolve. The $295 makes sense once you have render machines to spare and artists who spend their whole day on shots, because that’s where the network rendering and the bin server pay off.

8. Foundry Nuke

Compositors move to Nuke when After Effects stops being enough, usually on shots that need multi-pass CG integration, deep compositing, roto, cleanup or set extensions. I wouldn’t open it for titles or brand motion. If you’re curious how high-end compositing works, the free Non-commercial edition lets you poke around before anyone spends $3,839.

Browser-based After Effects alternatives

Rive, Canva and CapCut also have desktop apps, but all six of these work in a browser tab. Lottie is usually why product teams look here, and half of them export it. For ready-made files, the libraries and marketplaces collected in Lottie resources are worth checking before anyone animates from scratch.

9. Jitter

Image: Jitter

Designers who used to hand button states, notification animations, logo reveals and social cards to a motion person can do them in Jitter themselves, starting from a pasted Figma frame. For type-heavy work it’s also the first tool in our guide to how to animate text online. And it’s the only browser tool here whose free tier exports Lottie, so it costs nothing to find out whether your developers can use what it makes.

10. Rive

Image: Rive, Rive Editor page

For interactive work, Rive cuts out the old relay from After Effects to Lottie to a developer. A hover animation, or a progress meter driven by real data, lives in a state machine inside the file, something a rendered After Effects file can’t manage by itself. Plan extra time for the state machines, which take longer to learn than the animation side.

11. Lottielab

Image: Lottielab homepage

If your team already has a folder of Bodymovin exports, I’d start with Lottielab. It opens them, so the onboarding illustrations, empty states, loaders and small celebrations someone once built in After Effects can keep being edited in a browser tab.

12. SVGator

SVGator makes the most sense when the animation’s final home is a website, say a hero illustration that moves or a logo that draws itself. Don’t judge it by the free tier, which lets you explore the whole editor but only exports static files; anything that moves needs Starter.

13. Canva

Canva is first on my list of animation tools for non-designers, and here too it’s for people who don’t animate for a living. Presets and templates do most of the moving, so custom brand motion is hard to get out of it. An animated quote card, or a logo that fades up at the end of a clip, is easy.

14. CapCut

Animated captions and a zoom on the beat are the light end of After Effects work, and for a social team CapCut does both for free. Reusable animation rigs and compositing are beyond it.

How DaVinci Resolve compares with After Effects

If you edit, I’d pick Resolve. The free version is already a complete post suite, with edit, color, audio and Fusion for effects, and Studio costs $295. After Effects alone runs US$22.99 a month, and you still cut somewhere else. Blackmagic argues its node graph is faster than a layer stack once comps get complex. On a busy shot I agree, because the node tree shows you what feeds what, and nested precomps bury exactly that.

After Effects keeps its edge for a team that has paid for templates and third-party plugins over years, since most of that doesn’t carry over to Fusion. It also keeps it for anything headed into an app. Lottie started life in 2015 as an After Effects export, the Lottie Animation Community still names designing in After Effects and exporting with a plugin as a popular method, and Resolve has no Lottie export at all.

How CapCut compares with After Effects

CapCut is a free, fast editor for short-form social video. Its keyframes, graph curves, automatic captions and templates make a vertical clip look finished in minutes, and for a weekly run of short social cuts I’d use it over After Effects every time.

A custom logo animation or a title system is a different job, and it needs a motion tool, After Effects or one of the alternatives above. If what you’re actually choosing is a short-form editor, viral.new’s comparison of video editing software for short-form creators weighs CapCut against Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro on speed, AI features and price.

Relearning costs more than the license

A few weeks of a team relearning its tools can easily cost more than the most expensive license in the table above. The median special effects artist or animator in the US earned $102,030 a year in May 2025, going by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So before anyone migrates, push one real job through the new tool. A lower third won’t tell you much. Rebuild a piece from the last quarter and watch the boring parts: import, export, whether you get the Lottie you need, how files move between people, and who looks after the templates afterward. If the test mostly shows that nobody has the hours to learn a new tool, and the backlog is steady motion work, bringing in motion graphics designers may make more sense than switching software at all.