Scope, stated first
Search interest in "animation tools" is mostly people animating for fun: for YouTube, on an iPad, with their kids, in Roblox. That is a much larger audience than this page serves and we are not the right source for it. This page is about 2D animation that ships inside software: skeletal rigging for games, vector animation for interfaces, and code-driven animation.
If you want the best drawing app for an iPad, close this tab.
Start here
- Rigging characters for a game engine → Spine
- Interface animation with interaction logic built in → Rive
- Animating a web interface from JavaScript → Anime.js
- Explanatory or mathematical video from code → Manim
- Frame-by-frame or vector animation, free → Synfig Studio or Pencil2D
- Professional 2D production, and you want to own the licence → Moho
Three different jobs
| Job | Tools |
|---|---|
| Skeletal rigging with a runtime in your engine | Spine, Rive |
| Traditional and vector animation for video | Moho, TVPaint, OpenToonz, Synfig Studio, Pencil2D, Krita |
| Animation as source code | Anime.js, Manim |
A rigging tool cannot make your explainer video, and Manim cannot rig a character.
Compare
| Tool | Job | Licence | Cost | Integrations | Score | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spine | Rigging | Not recorded | Hybrid, free tier | 14 | 45.8 | 0.39 |
| Rive | Rigging / interface | Not recorded | From $9/mo, free tier | 16 | 53.7 | 0.55 |
| Anime.js | Code | MIT | Free | 0 | 52.8 | 0.19 |
| Manim | Code | MIT | Free | 0 | 51.4 | 0.16 |
| Krita | Paint with animation | Not recorded | Free | 1 | 64.7 | 0.40 |
| Moho | 2D production | Not recorded | From $59.99/mo, perpetual available | 5 | 52.2 | 0.30 |
| OpenToonz | 2D production | Not recorded | Free, open source | 0 | 54.9 | 0.24 |
| Synfig Studio | Vector | GPL-3.0 | Free | 0 | 45.1 | 0.29 |
| Pencil2D | Frame-by-frame | GPL-2.0 | Free | 0 | 40.9 | 0.29 |
| TVPaint Animation | 2D production | Not recorded | Not published | 0 | 49.5 | 0.03 |
Rigging, where the licence is the decision
Spine
Hybrid pricing with a free tier. 14 integrations, the breadth of official engine runtimes. Score 45.8, confidence 0.39.
The category standard for 2D skeletal animation in games, and the reason most people go looking for alternatives. Its pricing is tiered by what you are allowed to do, and the runtimes are licensed separately from the editor.
We hold no licence record for Spine, which is the single most consequential fact about it. Verify the terms directly with the vendor before committing. We would rather send you to the source than paraphrase a licence we have not captured cleanly.
Spine alternatives
spine alternative is by far our most-clicked query in this category.
| Leaving because | Go to |
|---|---|
| The licence tiers or per-seat cost | Rive |
| You are animating an interface, not a character | Rive, Anime.js |
| You want free and open source | Synfig Studio, Pencil2D |
| You need frame-by-frame, not skeletal | OpenToonz, Krita |
Most teams evaluating Spine alternatives discover their actual requirement was interface animation, which is Rive's territory rather than Spine's.
Rive
From $9/month, subscription, free tier. 16 integrations. Score 53.7, confidence 0.55, the best-evidenced entry here.
A vector animation tool with a state machine built in, so interaction logic lives in the animation rather than in your application code.
Pick it ifyou are animating product interfaces. Don't if you need a game rigging pipeline; Spine is aimed there and priced for studios.
Animation as code
Anime.js
MIT, free. 72,729 stars, 7,272 dependent repos. Shipped 2026-06-22. No advisories.
By far the most adopted option in this category, and one of the few adoption figures here we can state with real confidence.
Pick it ifyou are animating a web interface from JavaScript. No runtime licence question at all.
Manim
MIT, free. 40,720 stars. Shipped 2026-08-10. No advisories.
Animates mathematical and explanatory content from Python.
Pick it ifyou are making technical video. Its presence in a list alongside a frame-by-frame paint program shows how loose this category is.
Desktop animation software
| Tool | Notes |
|---|---|
| Krita | Tops our composite at 64.7, and we would not read much into it: Krita is primarily a painting application with animation features, and it scores well because we measure free open-source desktop software more completely than commercial suites |
| OpenToonz | Used in professional production. Our records show a 2016 release, which reflects release-feed collection rather than the project; check directly |
| Synfig Studio | GPL-3.0, actively maintained, shipped 2026-03-16 |
| Pencil2D | GPL-2.0, actively maintained, shipped 2026-03-13 |
| Moho | From $59.99/month, with a perpetual licence available, which is increasingly rare |
| Tumult Hype | Also offers a perpetual licence, from $49.99/month otherwise |
| TVPaint | Confidence 0.03. Treat as unmeasured |
How we scored this
Signals are properties of the software: licence, release cadence, published advisories, integrations, pricing transparency. No reviews, no company size, no web traffic, no vendor ad spend. Facts retrieved 2026-09-11, pricing observed 2026-09-14. Full method · Independence
This is a weakly-evidenced category and the scores are not a ranking. Confidence runs 0.03 to 0.57, most entries between 0.16 and 0.40. The best-measured product here is less well measured than the worst-measured product in our developer tooling categories.
Commercial desktop animation software has no public repository, no package registry presence and no advisory feed, so our composite shrinks toward a neutral 50 and the open-source entries rise relative to the commercial ones purely because we can see more of them. That is a property of our measurement, not of the tools.
Three specific gaps: no licence record for Spine, unreliable release dates for projects that tag without publishing GitHub Releases, and no coverage of consumer or mobile animation apps, which is why this page declares its scope rather than pretending to be comprehensive.