Lottie

Lottie turns After Effects animations into lightweight JSON files that render natively on web, iOS, and Android at any resolution. Designers animate in After Effects, export via Bodymovin, and developers drop in a 60KB runtime. No GIFs, no videos, no resolution trade-offs.

If your landing page or app needs polished animations — loading spinners, onboarding flows, micro-interactions — Lottie is the established choice with the biggest library of free animations on LottieFiles.com. Rive is the modern competitor with interactive state machines (animations that respond to user input) but a 200KB runtime. CSS animations are lighter but can't handle complex motion design.

The catch: Lottie requires the After Effects → Bodymovin pipeline, which means designers need Adobe licenses. Not all After Effects features export cleanly — gradients, masks, and expressions often break. And Lottie animations are one-way: they play, but they don't react to user input. For interactive animations, you need Rive.