Best 5 React Animation Libraries

Reactjs is the library of javascript and it is mainly famous for making more user-friendly user interfaces. These days modern web applications are becoming more complex to make them more attractive to users. For a React developer, It is very important to make the web app smoother by implementing the animations, we can easily achieve this by animating the text or images to complex 2D and 3D animations. It will make your website more attractive and increase the user experience. In this article, we will compare and see the top best react animation libraries that can speed up your development and save you some time.

React Animation Libraries

Best React Animation Libraries:

1. Framer Motion

Framer Motion

Framer Motion is the most famous React animation library which makes creating animations very easy. It has two APIs the Framer API and Motion API which abstract all the complexities behind the animations and allows you to create the animations very fast. The best thing about the framer motion is that it supports CSS variables, gestures, and server-side rendering.

To Install the Framer Motion in your React app, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install framer-motion

yarn add framer-motion

Features of Framer Motion:

• Easy to use and very rich animation options available
• It has built-in SVG animation capabilities
• Supports a very wide range of elements and UI animations.
• You can customize the animations according to your needs.
• Supports Server-side rendering
• You just need to set the correct configuration, it will automatically generate the animations.

2. Remotion

Remotion

Remotion library is used to create animations and videos by using programming languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript. That’s why you do not need any type of video creation knowledge, you can use your programming expertise. It can also help you to scale the video animation and production using server-side rendering and parametrization. It has more than 18,000 Github stars and 38,000+ weekly NPM downloads.

To Install the Remotion in your React app, run the following command in your terminal:

npm init video

yarn create video

Features of Remotion:

• No prior knowledge of video creation or video editing is required
• Support React features like reusable components, and quick reload
• Allows complex animations and visual effects to create engaging videos
• Supports seamless integration with existing React workflows and tooling
• Provides a powerful timeline video editor for sequencing and animating the components very easily
• Wide range of community and Documentation support

3. React Spring

React Spring

React Spring is a cross-platform spring-physics first animation library. It is very flexible and has some amazing features that cover almost every animation you need for the user interface. It also supports the react hooks to even help you better integrate with the react components. It has more than 26,000 GitHub stars and 726,204+ weekly NPM downloads.

To Install the React Spring in your React app, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install react-spring/web

yarn add react-spring

Features of React Spring:

• Provides smooth and fluid animations for React Applications.
• Fully compatible with Cross-browser and Cross-device.
• One can create animations by providing props to pre-defined components.
• The physics-based animations create very smooth and high frame-rate animations
• React spring support for the Jest for testing purposes.
• Support of Documentation and a very big community.

4. React Move

React Move

React Move is a library that is completely designed for creating beautiful user interfaces and data-driven animations by using the capabilities of D3.js. It is a very lightweight library and designed to support Typescript out of the box. React Move also supports custom functions to tweak the animations. It has more than 6500+ GitHub stars and 12200+ weekly npm downloads.

To Install the React Move in your React app, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install react-move

yarn add react-move

Features of React Move:

• Supports all the major frameworks and libraries like React, React-Native, and React-VR.
• Uses a declarative approach for syntax-defining animations in the React application.
• You can tweak the animation and customize it according to your needs.
• You can animate the SVG elements and attributes.
• D3-based animation engine gives whole new power for data visualization.

5. GreenSock (GSAP)

GreenSock 

If you want to create very high-performance animations then GreenSock might be the best for you even if it is one of the most widely used animation libraries. It is so powerful that it can animate any elements in your web application and solves countless inconsistencies in the browser with very smoothness and speed. It has more than 17900+ GitHub stars and 40000+ weekly npm downloads.

To Install the GreenSock in your React app, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install gsap

yarn add gsap

Features of GSAP:

• Provides cross-browser compatibility for smoother and more consistent experiences
• A plugin architecture that allows us to easily integrate additional features and increase the capabilities to a new level
• GSAP is very much optimized for the best and smoother performance
• You can easily control over the animation parameters and tweak them according to your needs
• You can precisely control multiple animations
• If you are stuck at any point in time GSAP provides you the Documentation

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed several React animation libraries along with their features and regardless of the project you are working on you can choose any of the animation libraries and start working on it. If you have a small project then you can choose the GSAP animation library because of its lightweight package and better performance. It all depends on you, you can pick any of the animation libraries and start working on it.