Adobe Animate is frozen. Rive is what Flash should've become.

Flash started as FutureSplash Animator in 1996, became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash Professional. In 2016, Adobe renamed it Animate — distancing from the "Flash" brand after years of security issues and Steve Jobs' controversial letter, Thoughts on Flash. When Flash Player was killed in December 2020, Animate survived as the authoring tool, exporting to HTML5 instead of SWF. TV animators, gamedevs, and web creators kept using it. Now even that is ending. Adobe just put Animate into maintenance mode. Bug fixes only, no new features. This isn't anything all that new, the software has been coasting for years. They just finally said it out loud. The community had been complaining for years that Adobe was neglecting it. The Feb 2026 announcement just made it official.

So what are the alternatives?

If you've been following the conversation online, you've probably seen the same lists. Toon Boom, Moho, Blender, Krita, OpenToonz. Those are all fine tools. But they're answering a different question than the one I think matters most.

The question isn't "what's the best 2D animation software now?" It's "what replaces the thing Animate/Flash actually was?"

Most alternatives miss the point

Animate wasn't just animation software. It was Flash. The tool where designers learned to code and developers learned to animate. One environment, no silos. You could build interactive content that shipped, with rich animation and code-driven logic. What you made in the tool was the actual product, not a mockup or prototype.

Toon Boom is for TV animation pipelines. Moho is for character rigging. Blender is a 3D suite with a 2D mode bolted on. These are great at what they do, but none of them are trying to be what Flash was.

If all you need is frame-by-frame animation for video output, those tools will serve you well. But if you're building interactive content (UI animations, stateful experiences, things that respond to user input and live data) that's a different problem entirely.

What Flash actually got right

Flash's fundamental concept was ahead of its time. The authoring tool and the runtime were the same thing. You weren't exporting to video, handing off some redlines, and hoping it matched. You were building the real, shippable thing. Design, animation, and code lived in the same environment.

Designers could write code and developers could push pixels. The line between the two was blurry, and that was the point. The tools that silo people into "designer" or "developer" are the problem, not some fundamental difference in how creative people think.

That creative freedom was unmatched. Nothing since has come close.

We built Rive to bring it back

Flash is the reason we started building Rive in the first place. It's where I learned to animate and code. A lot of our core team actually worked on Flash; you’ll still find our names in the Animate credits. So this isn't an outsider take. We lived inside that tool for decades, and we've spent the time since rebuilding what made it great.

Here's what Phil Chung on our team says about it:

I first downloaded a trial version of Macromedia Flash 3 in 1998 and little did I realize at the time that it would shape the course of my life for the next 27 years. I owe a lot of the success in my career to this piece of software that evolved over the years to become such a central part of the web, games, and video. Though I’d moved on to other platforms over the years, I joined the team at Rive because we shared the same goal of building not just a platform, but a community that would allow people to share their creativity in the same way Flash did.

It’s pretty special to have the opportunity to give Flash files a way to “live on” in an editor and modern runtime that we’re continually trying to improve for our users whether designers, coders, animators or artists. I hope Rive can give others everything Flash gave me and more.

Rive already has solved the hard tech behind a modern Flash:

• Design, animation, code all in one place

• Scripting using Luau (read why we chose it). Write logic directly in your Rive files. Combine that with Data Binding, and you can build fully interactive, data-driven experiences without leaving the editor.

• Open-source native runtimes for web, iOS, Android, web, Unity, Unreal, React Native, C++, and more. Rive runs everywhere, not just the browser. No plugins. Rive's runtimes get packaged directly into your app.

• Custom open-source renderer to gpu-accelerate vector graphics (hard problem, check out this game we built to demonstrate the performance on an iPhone)

• Complex international text support

• Performant realtime glows/shadows

• Bones and mesh deformations

• Tiny files. Rive's binary format produces files typically 10-15x smaller than equivalent Lottie JSON and 50x+ smaller than video.

• …and a bunch of other stuff like responsive layouts, inverse kinematics, n-slicing, and more (check out our full features page)

What we’re still working on:

• Text input fields (in development and coming soon)

• Accessibility (in development and coming soon with support for web, iOS, and Android first)

• An FLA importer (experimenting with one right now)

• Direct frame-by-frame drawing (we have Solos but the use case is a bit different)

• A Flash-like brush tool (this is something we’re building with our new scripting feature, which lets you extend the editor to build new tools… which are also then available at runtime, not just edit time)

Who's using it

Spotify Wrapped launched their experience with Rive (as did LinkedIn Year in Review). At the end of 2025, Rive went out to ~1.7B end users. Duolingo builds entire interactive experiences with Rive (lip-synced characters, UI components, Video Call with Lily, their chess app, and more). Google, Sonos, Notion, and hundreds of others ship with Rive across platforms. These aren't just animated micro-interactions — they're stateful, interactive, data-driven pieces of the product.

The transition from Animate

If you're coming from Animate or After Effects, the timeline and keyframing will feel familiar. The biggest shift is the State Machine and Data Binding. It's a more powerful model for anything interactive, but it does have a learning curve. Our docs and YouTube channel are the best spots to get started.

How concepts translate:

• .swf → .riv

• .fla → .rev

• Flash Player → Rive Runtime (open-source native library that gets packaged directly into your app, no plugin)

• Flash Scenes → Rive Artboards

• Flash MovieClips → Rive Components

• Flash frame labels + gotoAndPlay → Rive State Machines

• ActionScript → Rive Scripting (Luau)

• Flash's Library panel → Rive's Asset panel

• Flash Bone tool → Rive Bones

• Flash Runtime Armature → All Rive Bones and Constraints can be dynamically interacted with (or manipulated by data) at runtime

• Flash IK (default bone behavior) → Rive IK Constraints (opt-in per bone)

• Animate Asset Warp (Modern Rigging) → Rive mesh deformation (raster) + vertex binding (vector)

Try it out and let us know your feedback. We ship fast and are adding features weekly. This is the tool we've wanted for years, and our whole team is motivated to get things right.