After Effects is currently the industry standard for linear motion graphics, compositing, and video effects. It’s widely used in film and advertising to create polished, linear motion sequences. There’s no doubt it’s a powerful tool for motion designers.
But not all motion is linear.
When it comes to interactive motion design — graphics that react to user input, change dynamically, and run in real-time — After Effects isn’t built for that.
Rive, on the other hand, is designed for stateful, interactive graphics that run natively in apps, games, and the web. Instead of exporting video files, Rive files respond to user input, app logic, and external data. It’s the next step in interactive design.
Rive is also solving a bigger problem: We're on a mission to make hard-coded graphics a thing of the past with a new general-purpose graphics format for user interfaces.
With an end-to-end pipeline for designing, building, and running interactive graphics across platforms, Rive moves past linear formats to enable interactive, responsive, and data-bound visuals. The custom-built Rive Renderer ensures faster performance without compromising designer freedom.
While both tools can bring visuals to life, they serve fundamentally different purposes. After Effects is optimized for cinematic and linear motion, while Rive is built for state-driven, real-time software interfaces.
Let’s break down the key differences between the two tools and help you decide which best fits your project.
Who is each tool for?
Features breakdown
Motion capabilities
Rive is state-driven. It provides a state machine that uses timelines as states to create interactive graphics that can animate, respond, and transition at any moment.
After Effects provides industry-leading tools for linear timeline-based motion design and compositing. It’s used for creating post-production visual effects, compositing, and motion graphics for linear video content with a fixed duration.
Interactivity and state machines
Rive is designed for live interaction. Its State Machine allows for fluid transitions between different visual states based on user gestures, app logic, or data. This makes it ideal for responsive UI elements, interactive graphics, and real-time motion effects.
After Effects produces fixed sequences. Once exported, they play back exactly as designed. If you need motion graphics that respond to user actions, external inputs, or live data, you’ll need additional engineering work to make it interactive.
Responsiveness and adaptive motion
Rive, being vector-based and logic-driven, allows motion graphics to adapt dynamically across different screen sizes and environments without needing multiple exports.
After Effects is designed for fixed resolutions (e.g., 1920x1080 for HD video). If a motion graphic needs to scale across different devices, designers typically create multiple versions or use external software to resize exports.
Dynamic data integration
Rive: Data Binding allows graphics to reflect live data, making almost everything in a Rive graphic dynamically updatable at runtime, including color, size, text, images, lists, and components.
After Effects: Not built for live data. While some plugins and scripting options can simulate dynamic content, After Effects doesn’t natively support runtime data changes. Motion is pre-rendered, and any updates to content (like changing text or values) require re-rendering. It’s great for broadcast-ready motion, but not suited for interactive or real-time applications.
Technical performance
Rendering and output
Rive runs natively in software.
After Effects exports pre-rendered motion graphics, meaning every movement is baked into a video file or image sequence. If changes are needed, the file must be re-rendered.
File size and optimization
Rive’s purpose-built GPU Renderer ensures graphics run smoothly even on memory-constrained devices, using tools like Metal for iOS and the upcoming Vulkan backend for Android. Rive files are stored as vector instructions, keeping file sizes significantly smaller than traditional video files. Our out-of-band assets reduce memory footprint by letting you reuse raster images, fonts, or audio across multiple Rive files.
After Effects exports raster-based frame-by-frame formats, which can result in large file sizes, especially for long or complex motion graphics.
Workflow and collaboration
End-to-end pipeline
Rive: Combines design, animation, and runtime in a seamless pipeline. Changes in the Editor are reflected directly at runtime, reducing iteration cycles and errors.
After Effects: Motion designers create animations that are exported as flat assets (e.g., MP4, GIF, or Lottie), which then need to be handed off to developers for implementation. This handoff often introduces extra steps, communication gaps, and rework when changes are needed.
Collaboration
Rive: A collaborative Editor 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.
After Effects: Designed primarily for individual or serialized workflows. Collaboration often involves sharing project files manually or through Dropbox and Google Drive. Integrating motion assets into production codebases typically requires multiple handoffs and renders, making real-time iteration difficult.
Cost comparison
Rive offers a free plan with a full-featured Editor and full-featured export.
After Effects requires a paid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. While it includes a robust toolset for motion graphics and VFX, the cost can be a barrier for smaller teams or those only needing interactive graphics.
Flexibility and future-proofing
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.
After Effects: Optimized for video workflows. It’s less suited for emerging platforms like real-time games, responsive UI, or immersive experiences like VR. As new platforms emerge, After Effects may require additional tooling or workarounds to adapt.
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.
After Effects: Outputs are platform-agnostic video or Lottie files. This works for social content or motion assets in marketing. However, using After Effects motion graphics in live software often requires developer intervention, custom code, or conversion tools, particularly for games and apps where performance and flexibility are key.
Customer examples
Rive: Duolingo adopted Rive to enhance their interactive characters, achieving a 15x reduction in file size while improving performance and interactivity.
Case studies:
After Effects: Used by studios and creatives across film, broadcast, advertising, and online content. Major users include video editors, post-production houses, YouTubers, and digital agencies producing linear, high-quality motion graphics. Examples include title sequences for Netflix shows, brand animations, or explainer videos on YouTube.
Choosing the right tool
After Effects is built for the timeline and a hardcoded handoff. Rive is built for real-time and gives more control to designers.
Try Rive and see how much faster (and more fun) it is to bring interactive graphics to life.
After Effects is currently the industry standard for linear motion graphics, compositing, and video effects. It’s widely used in film and advertising to create polished, linear motion sequences. There’s no doubt it’s a powerful tool for motion designers.
But not all motion is linear.
When it comes to interactive motion design — graphics that react to user input, change dynamically, and run in real-time — After Effects isn’t built for that.
Rive, on the other hand, is designed for stateful, interactive graphics that run natively in apps, games, and the web. Instead of exporting video files, Rive files respond to user input, app logic, and external data. It’s the next step in interactive design.
Rive is also solving a bigger problem: We're on a mission to make hard-coded graphics a thing of the past with a new general-purpose graphics format for user interfaces.
With an end-to-end pipeline for designing, building, and running interactive graphics across platforms, Rive moves past linear formats to enable interactive, responsive, and data-bound visuals. The custom-built Rive Renderer ensures faster performance without compromising designer freedom.
While both tools can bring visuals to life, they serve fundamentally different purposes. After Effects is optimized for cinematic and linear motion, while Rive is built for state-driven, real-time software interfaces.
Let’s break down the key differences between the two tools and help you decide which best fits your project.
Who is each tool for?
Features breakdown
Motion capabilities
Rive is state-driven. It provides a state machine that uses timelines as states to create interactive graphics that can animate, respond, and transition at any moment.
After Effects provides industry-leading tools for linear timeline-based motion design and compositing. It’s used for creating post-production visual effects, compositing, and motion graphics for linear video content with a fixed duration.
Interactivity and state machines
Rive is designed for live interaction. Its State Machine allows for fluid transitions between different visual states based on user gestures, app logic, or data. This makes it ideal for responsive UI elements, interactive graphics, and real-time motion effects.
After Effects produces fixed sequences. Once exported, they play back exactly as designed. If you need motion graphics that respond to user actions, external inputs, or live data, you’ll need additional engineering work to make it interactive.
Responsiveness and adaptive motion
Rive, being vector-based and logic-driven, allows motion graphics to adapt dynamically across different screen sizes and environments without needing multiple exports.
After Effects is designed for fixed resolutions (e.g., 1920x1080 for HD video). If a motion graphic needs to scale across different devices, designers typically create multiple versions or use external software to resize exports.
Dynamic data integration
Rive: Data Binding allows graphics to reflect live data, making almost everything in a Rive graphic dynamically updatable at runtime, including color, size, text, images, lists, and components.
After Effects: Not built for live data. While some plugins and scripting options can simulate dynamic content, After Effects doesn’t natively support runtime data changes. Motion is pre-rendered, and any updates to content (like changing text or values) require re-rendering. It’s great for broadcast-ready motion, but not suited for interactive or real-time applications.
Technical performance
Rendering and output
Rive runs natively in software.
After Effects exports pre-rendered motion graphics, meaning every movement is baked into a video file or image sequence. If changes are needed, the file must be re-rendered.
File size and optimization
Rive’s purpose-built GPU Renderer ensures graphics run smoothly even on memory-constrained devices, using tools like Metal for iOS and the upcoming Vulkan backend for Android. Rive files are stored as vector instructions, keeping file sizes significantly smaller than traditional video files. Our out-of-band assets reduce memory footprint by letting you reuse raster images, fonts, or audio across multiple Rive files.
After Effects exports raster-based frame-by-frame formats, which can result in large file sizes, especially for long or complex motion graphics.
Workflow and collaboration
End-to-end pipeline
Rive: Combines design, animation, and runtime in a seamless pipeline. Changes in the Editor are reflected directly at runtime, reducing iteration cycles and errors.
After Effects: Motion designers create animations that are exported as flat assets (e.g., MP4, GIF, or Lottie), which then need to be handed off to developers for implementation. This handoff often introduces extra steps, communication gaps, and rework when changes are needed.
Collaboration
Rive: A collaborative Editor 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.
After Effects: Designed primarily for individual or serialized workflows. Collaboration often involves sharing project files manually or through Dropbox and Google Drive. Integrating motion assets into production codebases typically requires multiple handoffs and renders, making real-time iteration difficult.
Cost comparison
Rive offers a free plan with a full-featured Editor and full-featured export.
After Effects requires a paid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. While it includes a robust toolset for motion graphics and VFX, the cost can be a barrier for smaller teams or those only needing interactive graphics.
Flexibility and future-proofing
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.
After Effects: Optimized for video workflows. It’s less suited for emerging platforms like real-time games, responsive UI, or immersive experiences like VR. As new platforms emerge, After Effects may require additional tooling or workarounds to adapt.
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.
After Effects: Outputs are platform-agnostic video or Lottie files. This works for social content or motion assets in marketing. However, using After Effects motion graphics in live software often requires developer intervention, custom code, or conversion tools, particularly for games and apps where performance and flexibility are key.
Customer examples
Rive: Duolingo adopted Rive to enhance their interactive characters, achieving a 15x reduction in file size while improving performance and interactivity.
Case studies:
After Effects: Used by studios and creatives across film, broadcast, advertising, and online content. Major users include video editors, post-production houses, YouTubers, and digital agencies producing linear, high-quality motion graphics. Examples include title sequences for Netflix shows, brand animations, or explainer videos on YouTube.
Choosing the right tool
After Effects is built for the timeline and a hardcoded handoff. Rive is built for real-time and gives more control to designers.
Try Rive and see how much faster (and more fun) it is to bring interactive graphics to life.
After Effects is currently the industry standard for linear motion graphics, compositing, and video effects. It’s widely used in film and advertising to create polished, linear motion sequences. There’s no doubt it’s a powerful tool for motion designers.
But not all motion is linear.
When it comes to interactive motion design — graphics that react to user input, change dynamically, and run in real-time — After Effects isn’t built for that.
Rive, on the other hand, is designed for stateful, interactive graphics that run natively in apps, games, and the web. Instead of exporting video files, Rive files respond to user input, app logic, and external data. It’s the next step in interactive design.
Rive is also solving a bigger problem: We're on a mission to make hard-coded graphics a thing of the past with a new general-purpose graphics format for user interfaces.
With an end-to-end pipeline for designing, building, and running interactive graphics across platforms, Rive moves past linear formats to enable interactive, responsive, and data-bound visuals. The custom-built Rive Renderer ensures faster performance without compromising designer freedom.
While both tools can bring visuals to life, they serve fundamentally different purposes. After Effects is optimized for cinematic and linear motion, while Rive is built for state-driven, real-time software interfaces.
Let’s break down the key differences between the two tools and help you decide which best fits your project.
Who is each tool for?
Features breakdown
Motion capabilities
Rive is state-driven. It provides a state machine that uses timelines as states to create interactive graphics that can animate, respond, and transition at any moment.
After Effects provides industry-leading tools for linear timeline-based motion design and compositing. It’s used for creating post-production visual effects, compositing, and motion graphics for linear video content with a fixed duration.
Interactivity and state machines
Rive is designed for live interaction. Its State Machine allows for fluid transitions between different visual states based on user gestures, app logic, or data. This makes it ideal for responsive UI elements, interactive graphics, and real-time motion effects.
After Effects produces fixed sequences. Once exported, they play back exactly as designed. If you need motion graphics that respond to user actions, external inputs, or live data, you’ll need additional engineering work to make it interactive.
Responsiveness and adaptive motion
Rive, being vector-based and logic-driven, allows motion graphics to adapt dynamically across different screen sizes and environments without needing multiple exports.
After Effects is designed for fixed resolutions (e.g., 1920x1080 for HD video). If a motion graphic needs to scale across different devices, designers typically create multiple versions or use external software to resize exports.
Dynamic data integration
Rive: Data Binding allows graphics to reflect live data, making almost everything in a Rive graphic dynamically updatable at runtime, including color, size, text, images, lists, and components.
After Effects: Not built for live data. While some plugins and scripting options can simulate dynamic content, After Effects doesn’t natively support runtime data changes. Motion is pre-rendered, and any updates to content (like changing text or values) require re-rendering. It’s great for broadcast-ready motion, but not suited for interactive or real-time applications.
Technical performance
Rendering and output
Rive runs natively in software.
After Effects exports pre-rendered motion graphics, meaning every movement is baked into a video file or image sequence. If changes are needed, the file must be re-rendered.
File size and optimization
Rive’s purpose-built GPU Renderer ensures graphics run smoothly even on memory-constrained devices, using tools like Metal for iOS and the upcoming Vulkan backend for Android. Rive files are stored as vector instructions, keeping file sizes significantly smaller than traditional video files. Our out-of-band assets reduce memory footprint by letting you reuse raster images, fonts, or audio across multiple Rive files.
After Effects exports raster-based frame-by-frame formats, which can result in large file sizes, especially for long or complex motion graphics.
Workflow and collaboration
End-to-end pipeline
Rive: Combines design, animation, and runtime in a seamless pipeline. Changes in the Editor are reflected directly at runtime, reducing iteration cycles and errors.
After Effects: Motion designers create animations that are exported as flat assets (e.g., MP4, GIF, or Lottie), which then need to be handed off to developers for implementation. This handoff often introduces extra steps, communication gaps, and rework when changes are needed.
Collaboration
Rive: A collaborative Editor 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.
After Effects: Designed primarily for individual or serialized workflows. Collaboration often involves sharing project files manually or through Dropbox and Google Drive. Integrating motion assets into production codebases typically requires multiple handoffs and renders, making real-time iteration difficult.
Cost comparison
Rive offers a free plan with a full-featured Editor and full-featured export.
After Effects requires a paid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. While it includes a robust toolset for motion graphics and VFX, the cost can be a barrier for smaller teams or those only needing interactive graphics.
Flexibility and future-proofing
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.
After Effects: Optimized for video workflows. It’s less suited for emerging platforms like real-time games, responsive UI, or immersive experiences like VR. As new platforms emerge, After Effects may require additional tooling or workarounds to adapt.
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.
After Effects: Outputs are platform-agnostic video or Lottie files. This works for social content or motion assets in marketing. However, using After Effects motion graphics in live software often requires developer intervention, custom code, or conversion tools, particularly for games and apps where performance and flexibility are key.
Customer examples
Rive: Duolingo adopted Rive to enhance their interactive characters, achieving a 15x reduction in file size while improving performance and interactivity.
Case studies:
After Effects: Used by studios and creatives across film, broadcast, advertising, and online content. Major users include video editors, post-production houses, YouTubers, and digital agencies producing linear, high-quality motion graphics. Examples include title sequences for Netflix shows, brand animations, or explainer videos on YouTube.
Choosing the right tool
After Effects is built for the timeline and a hardcoded handoff. Rive is built for real-time and gives more control to designers.
Try Rive and see how much faster (and more fun) it is to bring interactive graphics to life.
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