Rive vs Lottie

Lottie revolutionized how designers deliver lightweight linear animations for web and mobile.

Rive is solving a bigger problem: We're on a mission to make hard-coded graphics history with a new general-purpose graphics format for all software, and Ul — and animation is just a part of the puzzle.

With an end-to-end pipeline for designing, building, and running interactive graphics across platforms, Rive moves past linear formats to enable interactive and responsive visuals. The custom-built Rive Renderer ensures smaller files and faster performance without compromising designer freedom.

This guide compares Rive and Lottie across key dimensions to help teams choose the right tool for their projects. 

Primary use cases

Features breakdown

Interactivity and state machines

Rive: The State Machine is a cornerstone feature that allows designers to create complex, interactive graphics that respond to user inputs or data in real-time. This eliminates guesswork for developers and ensures accurate results are obtained directly from the editor.

Lottie: While Lottie supports scroll-based and basic triggered animations, all interactivity must be coded manually.

Responsiveness

Rive: Features like Layout and Scrolling make it easy to design graphics that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations. This extends beyond micro-interactions to full-screen, adaptive designs.

Lottie: No built-in support for responsive layouts; resizing typically requires recreating animations for different screen sizes.

Dynamic data integration

Rive: Upcoming data binding allows graphics to reflect live data, making almost everything in a Rive graphic dynamically updatable at runtime, such as color, size, text, images, lists, and components. 

Lottie: Static by nature, Lottie requires developer intervention for basic updates.

Blurs and shadows

Rive: Instead of traditional rasterized effects, Rive introduces Vector Feathering, a technique that creates soft glows and shadows without the performance hit of a traditional blur.

Lottie: Supports rasterized blur and shadow effects, but these can increase file sizes and performance costs, especially on mobile.

Masking

Rive: Supports clipping but does not yet offer alpha masking, though it's in development.

Lottie: Includes both clipping and alpha masking.

Scripting

Rive: Actively working on a scripting engine to allow for logic-drive interactivity and advanced control.

Lottie: Supports expressions via JavaScript, allowing for procedural animations and logic-based movement.

Technical performance

File size and rendering

Rive: An uncompressed Rive file uses a lightweight binary format designed specifically for runtime, resulting in file sizes that are typically 10-15x smaller than equivalent Lottie files. Example: A Lottie animation at 240KB can be recreated in Rive at just 16KB. 

Lottie: An uncompressed Lottie file is JSON formatted. It’s versatile but bloated compared to Rive’s optimized binary files.

GPU-accelerated rendering

Rive: Purpose-built GPU rendering ensures animations run smoothly even on memory-constrained devices, using tools like Metal for iOS and upcoming Vulkan for Android.

Lottie: Relies on vector rendering libraries, which can struggle with complex or resource-intensive animations.

iOS memory usage and CPU performance

Rive: Optimized for performance, ensuring smooth playback even with multiple complex animations on-screen. Rive’s out-of-band assets reduce memory footprint by letting you reuse raster images, fonts, or audio across multiple Rive files. 

Note: When comparing total system memory usage on iOS, Rive often uses less overall, but its in-process Metal allocation can make it appear higher in app-specific profiling. 

Lottie: Relies on Core Animation to offload some work to the Apple render server, which doesn’t appear in the app’s memory profile. CPU usage often shows as 0% in profiling tools because it offloads animation playback to the render server, a separate system process. This means Lottie’s CPU usage doesn’t appear in the app process itself, even though it’s still consuming resources. 

More runtime comparisons coming soon.

Workflow and collaboration

End-to-end pipeline

Rive: Combines design, animation, and runtime in a seamless pipeline. Changes in the Editor are reflected directly in the runtime, reducing iteration cycles and errors. 

Lottie: Requires multiple tools — Illustrator or Figma for design, After Effects for animation, and Bodymovin for exporting JSON files. Changes often require revisiting the entire process.

Collaboration

Rive: Allows teams to co-create and iterate without switching platforms or tools. Designers and developers can share real-time previews using Rive’s Share feature. 

Lottie: Collaboration relies on external tools for sharing and feedback, adding extra steps.

Flexibility and future-proofing

Asset management

Rive: Supports asset reusability across multiple projects, including dynamic swapping of fonts, images, and audio during runtime. Libraries for design systems are planned for future updates. 

Lottie: Static assets are embedded in the JSON files, increasing file size and limiting flexibility. 

Platform support

Rive: A unified C++ runtime ensures consistent behavior across platforms, including game engines like Unity and Unreal, as well as iOS, Android, Web, and Flutter. What you see in the Editor is what you get in Rive’s runtimes. Our unified renderer ensures consistent results and our fully controlled pipeline means Rive isn’t reliant on third parties for fixes.

Lottie: Primarily supports web and mobile platforms but lacks native game engine integration. 

Customer examples

Rive: Duolingo adopted Rive to enhance its interactive characters, achieving a 15x reduction in file size while improving performance and interactivity. 

Case studies: 

• Brilliant.org

• Intercom

• Pocketwatch Games

• Hiber3D

• Yeti Confetti

• Metafy

• Fluxverse

• Age of Learning

Lottie: Popular for simpler marketing animations on platforms like Airbnb, OpenAI, and Tide.

Choosing the right tool

Lottie has been a valuable tool for simple web or marketing linear animations, but the digital world is moving on. For interactive, state-driven graphics that need to adapt across platforms, Rive provides unmatched flexibility, performance, and scalability.

Rive is a leap forward for teams building graphics for an interactive era. Try Rive and experience the difference in real-time interactivity and creative control.