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EffectCraft

The free alternative toAfter Effects

🟢 Beginner⏱️ ~5 min to installYou save €27/mo

EffectCraft is an open source rewrite of After Effects, built from scratch by the ArtCraft team. You find After Effects’ panels, menus and shortcuts: compositions and precomps, shape and text layers, masks, keyframes with the Graph Editor, expressions (wiggle, loopOut), Puppet tools, 306 effects including every After Effects one, and 3D with cameras and lights. It exports to MP4, ProRes, WebM or image sequences, and to Lottie for the web. MIT or Apache 2.0 license, free on Mac, Windows and Linux, with no account. The catch: it is an alpha started in October 2026, which the team rates 45% ready for professional work. It cannot open .aep projects, and After Effects plug-ins do not run in it.

Screenshot of EffectCraft, the free open source alternative to After Effects
GitHub stars8,129
View on GitHub ↗

Versus After Effects: the match

  • Price

    EffectCraft

    €0, on every platform

    After Effects

    €27/month, one year commitment

  • Account and sign in

    EffectCraft

    No account, no telemetry, everything stays on your machine

    After Effects

    Adobe account required

  • Projects and plug-ins

    EffectCraft

    Neither .aep files nor After Effects plug-ins

    After Effects

    Its native format and all its plug-ins

After Effects ↗

How to install it (even from zero)

The simplest path: download EffectCraft from its official page. It installs like any other app and works with no account. The prompt below has Claude pick the right file for your machine and check the download.

  1. 1

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It detects your system, downloads the right version and checks it has not been tampered with:

    Je veux installer EffectCraft (le logiciel d’animation et d’effets visuels open source qui reprend After Effects, dépôt GitHub officiel storytold/effectcraft, site getartcraft.com/apps/effectcraft) à la place d’un abonnement After Effects. Guide-moi pas à pas et pose-moi des questions si besoin. Repère d’abord mon système (macOS, Windows ou Linux) et mon processeur (Apple Silicon, Intel, x64 ou ARM). Télécharge ensuite la dernière version publiée dans les releases du dépôt storytold/effectcraft, ou sur la page officielle getartcraft.com/apps/effectcraft, en prenant le fichier qui correspond : l’image disque universelle sur Mac, l’installateur .msi sur Windows (x64, ARM64 ou 32 bits), l’AppImage, le paquet .deb, le paquet .rpm ou le Flatpak sur Linux. Vérifie l’empreinte SHA-256 du fichier avec le fichier SHA256SUMS.txt publié avec la même version, et arrête-toi si elle ne correspond pas. Installe l’appli et vérifie qu’elle démarre. Si macOS bloque l’ouverture, explique-moi comment l’autoriser dans Réglages Système, sans désactiver la sécurité de mon Mac. Rappelle-moi qu’EffectCraft est encore en alpha, plus testé sur Mac que sur Windows et Linux : je garde mes projets After Effects et je travaille sur des copies de mes rushs. Si j’utilise Claude Code, propose-moi aussi d’installer l’outil en ligne de commande effectcraft-cli de la même version et de brancher son serveur MCP (effectcraft-cli mcp), pour que tu puisses animer à ma place. Pour finir, ouvre le projet de démonstration, crée avec moi un titre animé de cinq secondes et exporte-le en MP4, puis dis-moi ce qui marche et ce qui manque.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  2. 2

    Animate a real title

    The best test: redo one of your animated titles or a graphics package from your videos. You see right away what works and what is missing, and you can export it to Lottie for your site.

  3. 3

    Keep After Effects for client projects

    It does not open .aep files and plug-ins do not run in it. For your titles, animations and Lottie files, try EffectCraft for a week before you renew your subscription.

What you actually do with it

Your motion design without a subscription

Compositions, keyframes, expressions and 306 effects: your titles and animations, without the €27 a month.

Your animations go out as Lottie

Lottie export is built in, no plug-in needed: your animation goes straight to your site or app.

Claude animates for you

Every action is a command: through its MCP server or the command line, your agent sets keyframes, applies effects and starts the render.

Project health, at a glance

Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.

75/100

Good

Healthy, followed project: a good everyday choice.

Activity
100

Is the code moving? (commits in the last 30 days)

Maintenance
100

How fresh is the latest update? Fresher is better.

Community
82

Stars and contributors: people around means help and fixes.

Maturity
40

Project age. Old enough to be solid, still alive.

Momentum
55

Current pace versus its usual pace: speeding up or dozing off?

The repo in numbers

GitHub stars
8.1k
Forks
4.3k
Contributors
111
Commits
2.7k
Project age
0.1 yrs
Last commit
today
Size
34.1 MB
License
Apache-2.0

Built with

  • Rust 95.4%
  • WGSL 2.6%
  • JavaScript 1.5%

Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.

Loucash’s take

6/10

The youngest of the suite, and maybe the most ambitious: an After Effects rewritten from scratch, with the same panels, the same shortcuts, expressions, 3D and 306 effects. And it does one thing After Effects cannot do without a plug-in: export to Lottie. What may bite: it is an alpha, started on 1 October. The team itself rates it 45% ready for professional work: it does not open .aep files, plug-ins do not run, and both Windows and Linux still have interface bugs. For your animated titles and Lottie files, it is worth a try. For a client project, keep After Effects for now.

It’s for you if: You make animated titles, graphics packages for your videos or Lottie animations for your site, and you pay for After Effects mostly for that. If you work on clients’ .aep projects or live on plug-ins, keep After Effects for now.

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