Intro
As of 2024, the motion design industry is experiencing a new wave of tools. Two interesting services have appeared in the past six months: Phase and Lottie Creator. This article is my personal comparison of the two tools, what they are trying to do, and where they sit in the market.
There are already many motion design tools, but Adobe After Effects remains the dominant one in motion graphics. It has been around for roughly 30 years and is still the tool most designers reach for when creating video with complex animation. Even today, I do not think another motion tool has surpassed After Effects as a complete package. That is exactly why the arrival of Lottie Creator and Phase feels refreshing.
Three-point summary
- Both Lottie Creator and Phase still fall well short of After Effects when it comes to the detail needed for professional motion quality.
- Even so, both already offer enough to make interesting work. Unlike After Effects they are free, and their gaps are being addressed quickly.
- Editing motion together on the same canvas, much like Figma, looks useful. The open question is whether it will be useful enough to become a game changer.
Pros
- They are lightweight. Both tools are built as 2D web apps, so they feel much lighter than desktop-based After Effects. They can handle moderately complex keyframes without much trouble and make it easy to test simple motion quickly.
- They are free and support Lottie. Blender and CapCut can also be used to create keyframe animation, but animation is a supporting feature rather than their core. The arrival of free 2D motion tools built around the Lottie format is meaningful in itself.
- They are approachable for beginners. Both products provide presets for people who find it difficult to start animating from scratch. You still need to create keyframes for your own assets, but Lottie Creator's animation presets and Phase's Animate Mode lower that first barrier.
There were also a few unexpectedly useful details:
- Phase lets you copy and paste Bezier curve values, which makes it easy to reuse a familiar sense of timing. It feels both convenient and logical.
- Lottie Creator's animation presets let you bring in polished motion with only a few clicks without flattening or losing the keyframes.
Cons
Both tools need to focus more on the essence of motion graphics: nuanced motion quality. To shape motion beyond a certain level, designers need an environment where they can work more freely with keyframes through speed and value graphs. Those graphs make it possible to see how velocity and values change over time, then test and direct dynamic tension with precision. Graph-based editing is harder for beginners, but the disappointing part is that even after learning these new tools, the quality ceiling remains much lower than in After Effects.