What Is EffectCraft? The Free Open-Source After Effects Alternative

EffectCraft is a free, open-source compositor for animated titles, motion graphics and compositing — the jobs people open After Effects for. The ArtCraft team built it in Rust with After Effects' panels, menus, shortcuts and keyframe behaviour. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser: try EffectCraft online.

What you can make

• Layers of every kind: solids, shapes, text, footage, nested compositions, nulls, adjustment layers, cameras and lights, with parenting, track mattes, 38 blend modes and motion blur.
• Keyframes that behave like After Effects: linear, Bezier, hold, roving keys, Easy Ease and a graph editor with value and speed graphs.
• Shapes and masks: trim paths, repeaters, round corners, wiggle and more; pen-drawn masks with feather and expansion.
• Text: point and paragraph text with text animators and range selectors.
• Expressions: JavaScript with the After Effects object model — wiggle, loopOut, thisComp.layer("…") — plus the pick-whip.
• 306 effects, layer styles, 3D cameras and lights, and a render queue.

It also goes beyond After Effects in a few places: Lottie is built in, projects are versioned JSON (.ecproj) that diff cleanly in Git, and everything is scriptable.

Where it stands

EffectCraft is the newest of the Crafting Apps. Its authors say nearly every After Effects feature exists, but that existing is not the same as behaving exactly like After Effects — and they have not measured that yet. After Effects .aep projects cannot be opened and plug-ins don't run, so it is not a replacement for client work today.

Try it

EffectCraft Online opens with a sample composition. Scrub the timeline, open the graph editor and swap in your own text in seconds.