EffectCraft · Alternative to After Effects
EffectCraft: Free, Open-Source After Effects Alternative
EffectCraft is an open-source, clean-room motion graphics and compositing app in pure Rust, modelled on After Effects.
- Early alpha
- v0.8.0 · October 11, 2026
- GitHub ★ 4.9k
- MIT / Apache-2.0
What EffectCraft does
Layers and keyframes
Solids, shapes, text, footage, precomps, nulls, cameras and lights; parenting, track mattes, 38 blend modes, and a Graph Editor with value and speed graphs.
306 effects and layer styles
306 effects, covering all 298 of After Effects', with its parameter names and defaults, plus all nine Layer Styles with Global Light.
Expressions
JavaScript with the After Effects object model, including wiggle, loopOut and thisComp.layer(), with an inline editor and the pick-whip.
Classic 3D
3D layers with materials, one- and two-node cameras with depth of field, and lights with soft ray-traced shadows.
Render Queue without FFmpeg
H.264, ProRes, HEVC, AV1 and WebM output, image sequences including 32-bit EXR, all encoded in pure Rust and runnable from the command line.
Lottie built in
Lottie import and export without a plugin; export lists anything Lottie cannot express.
File formats
- ECPROJ (native JSON, read/write)
- Lottie .json/.lottie (read/write)
- H.264 MP4, ProRes MOV (export)
- HEVC/AV1 MP4, WebM (export)
- PNG/JPEG/TIFF/EXR sequences (export)
- Animated GIF, WAV/AIFF (export)
How mature is it?
Alpha and very young (first commit 1 October 2026): about 91% of After Effects features exist, but only ~45% of the way to replacing it for professional work.
Biggest gaps
- After Effects .aep/.aepx projects cannot be opened, and After Effects plug-ins do not run.
- Behaviour still differs from After Effects in places, and nothing yet compares renders automatically.
- macOS is the most tested platform; Linux and Windows users have hit basic interaction bugs.
Automation and AI agents
Every menu action is a command reachable through an MCP server (effectcraft-cli mcp, headless or bridged to the app), one-shot CLI calls, and a JSON-lines control channel.