EffectCraft vs After Effects: A Young Open-Source Compositor Takes on Motion Graphics

EffectCraft vs After Effects is the youngest comparison in this series. The EffectCraft repository was created on 1 October 2026, its README says its first commit was that day, and within a week it listed 306 effects, layer styles, expressions, 3D cameras and lights and a render queue. That speed is impressive and also the reason to read its own warnings: "existing is not the same as behaving exactly like After Effects, and we haven't measured that yet."

What EffectCraft sets out to do

EffectCraft targets the work people reach for After Effects to do: animated titles, motion graphics and compositing. You build a composition from layers, animate properties with keyframes, stack effects and render. It follows the familiar After Effects panels: Project, Composition, Timeline, Effect Controls, Effects and Presets, Character, Paragraph, Align, Info, Preview, Audio and Render Queue.

It belongs to the ArtCraft family of open-source apps, which also includes FilmCraft for editing and is covered in the Crafting Apps guide. The licence is stated as MIT or Apache-2.0, and it runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux and in a browser through WebAssembly.

Adobe After Effects is the closed-source standard for motion graphics, sold on subscription, with a deep plug-in market, a scripting model and tight links to Premiere Pro and Photoshop.

What EffectCraft includes

Layers. Solids, shapes, text, footage, nested compositions, nulls, adjustment layers, cameras and lights, with parenting, track mattes, 38 blend modes and motion blur.

Keyframes. Linear, Bezier, hold, auto and continuous Bezier and roving keys, Easy Ease, Keyframe Velocity and Interpolation dialogs, and a Graph Editor with value and speed graphs.

Time. Time remapping, time stretch, reverse, freeze frame, work area, markers and exact timing at every frame rate, including 29.97 drop-frame.

Shapes and masks. Shape layers with trim paths, repeaters, round corners, offset and zig zag, plus masks.

Effects and 3D. The README counts 306 effects, layer styles, expressions, and 3D cameras and lights.

Roto and tracking. Roto Brush can use the MobileSAM model as an optional download from Settings, and face tracking can use Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker as another optional download. The README says neither is compared with After Effects yet.

Three places it goes its own way

1. Lottie built in. Import and export are part of the app, which helps designers who ship animation to websites and mobile apps.
2. A readable project file. Projects are versioned JSON, so they diff in version control and scripts can generate them.
3. Everything scriptable. Every menu item, timeline drag and property edit passes through one command registry, so the same actions work from a command line, a JSON control channel or an MCP server.

It also ships its own video and audio encoders, with VP9, AV1, HEVC and Opus written in Rust and no FFmpeg, building on the codecs from FilmCraft.

What does not work yet

The README states these limits plainly:

• After Effects projects cannot be opened, and After Effects plug-ins do not run.
• Behaviour still differs from After Effects in places, and nothing compares renders automatically.
• macOS is the best-tested platform, and Linux and Windows have basic interaction bugs.
• The trained models for Roto Brush and face tracking are new and unmeasured.

The project calls itself "a good place to try things and to tell us what breaks". For a studio with a pipeline of .aep files and plug-ins such as particle systems or tracking, that rules it out for now.

Effects, expressions and 3D

The README says EffectCraft ships 306 effects, covering every one of After Effects' 298 and a few more, each with matching parameter names, order and defaults. The categories include blur and sharpen, channel, colour correction, distort, generate, keying, matte, noise and grain, perspective, simulation, stylise, time, audio, text, transitions and utility. Simulation covers effects such as particles, rain, shatter and caustics. All nine layer styles are present with Global Light.

Expressions use JavaScript with the After Effects object model, including wiggle, loopOut and thisComp layer references, with an inline editor and the pick-whip. Text supports animators with range selectors, and puppet tools provide Position, Advanced, Bend, Starch and Overlap pins on a mesh built from a layer, with real-time pin recording and follow-through for hair and cloth.

The 3D system follows the classic After Effects model: 3D layers with material options, one-node and two-node cameras with depth of field, parallel, spot, point and ambient lights with soft ray-traced shadows, and orbit, pan and dolly tools with Front, Top, Left and Custom views.

Coverage on paper is one thing and rendering parity is another. The README admits nothing yet compares EffectCraft's output with After Effects automatically, so a particle effect or a depth-of-field setting may not look identical to the original.

Rendering and the command line

The Render Queue mirrors After Effects, with Render Settings and Output Modules and templates. Output includes H.264 MP4, ProRes MOV from Proxy to 4444 XQ with alpha, HEVC and AV1 MP4, WebM with VP9 or AV1 and Opus audio, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and 32-bit EXR sequences, animated GIF, WAV and AIFF. It supports field rendering with 3:2 pulldown, region of interest, resize and post-render actions, and the same queue runs from the command line.

Installers on the releases page include a universal macOS app, Windows MSI and portable packages for x64, x86 and ARM64, and Linux AppImage, deb, rpm and tarball packages for x86_64 and aarch64. The README states that the Windows ARM64 build is tested in CI by installing and running the command-line tool, but that the app window and the test suite do not run natively on ARM64 there yet.

Examples show how scripting works: one command sets a layer's position and saves the project, another renders a composition to MP4, and a third exports a composition as Lottie. An MCP server exposes commands, the project and property tree, keyframes and rendered frames to agents, and a ready configuration file ships in the repository.

Cost and ownership

EffectCraft is free and released under MIT or Apache-2.0. Because projects are readable JSON, a team can store them in Git and review changes as text. That matters for studios that treat motion graphics as templates fed by data.

After Effects remains tied to a subscription and the wider Adobe ecosystem, and its plug-in market is a large part of its value. If your work depends on third-party plug-ins for particles, tracking or colour, EffectCraft cannot run them.

Comparison table

A realistic evaluation plan

If you want to judge EffectCraft fairly, start with work you can afford to redo:

1. Rebuild a simple lower third or logo sting from scratch and render it.
2. Export the same idea as Lottie and check it in your target web or app environment.
3. Check the speed of your usual footage resolution and effects stack on your own machine.
4. Look at whether the JSON project file fits your version-control habits.

Skip it, for now, for client deliveries that depend on exact After Effects behaviour.

Which to choose

Choose After Effects for professional motion work, shared projects and plug-ins. Choose EffectCraft to explore an open, scriptable compositor and to support a project that is moving fast. Choose Blender if you want a mature open-source tool with 3D, animation and a built-in compositor, even though its interface is nothing like After Effects.

The video editing category lists more tools, and the FilmCraft vs Premiere Pro comparison covers the editing side of the same suite.