Is there a free alternative to After Effects?

This is a partial one. The effect rack, blend modes, track mattes, keyframes with a curve editor and the text animators are all here and all free — 172 effects in total, no watermark, no account. There is no 3D, no expressions, no precomps and no tracking, which is a large part of what After Effects is.

Can I open my After Effects projects?

No. There is no importer for .aep or for any other application's project format. Your source media opens here normally; the comp would be rebuilt.

Does it have expressions?

No. There is no expression language and no way to link one property to another. Everything is keyframed by hand, with a curve editor and eight easings for the shaping.

Can it do motion tracking?

No. There is no point or planar tracking to parent a layer to. The two stabilisation effects measure the camera's path through the clip and undo it, which is a different job and the only one of the two it does.

Are the effects the same ones?

Many carry the same names and do the same thing — Colorama, CC Toner, Turbulent Displace, Corner Pin, Bezier Warp, Optics Compensation, Fractal Noise, Lens Flare, Echo, Time Displacement, Advanced Spill Suppressor. They are separate implementations running as WebGL shaders, so expect the same control and not the same pixel.

Can I animate text the way I do in After Effects?

Yes, and this is the closest correspondence in the product. Animators hold the property amounts and range selectors decide who gets them, by characters, words or lines, with falloff shapes, ease, randomisation and a keyframeable offset. Stack two animators and letters can slide in while a second one spins them.

Does it run on the GPU?

Yes. Effects are WebGL shaders and composite on your graphics card, so the rack scrubs without a render step. Export encodes on your own machine through WebCodecs.

bentocut

After Effects alternative · Free · In a browser tab

Some of After Effects, free, in a browser tab.

The effect rack, blend modes, track mattes, keyframes with a curve editor, and text animators with real range selectors. Not the 3D, and not the expressions.

Open the editor See the whole editor

The five things it cannot do are at the top of this page, not the bottom.

Read this part first

Five things After Effects does that this does not.

They are put at the top rather than the bottom because four of them are not features — they are most of what a compositor is, and if your job needs one, the rest of this page is a waste of your afternoon.

3D

There are no 3D layers, no cameras and no lights. Everything composites in a plane. A parallax move built from scaled 2D layers is possible; anything that needs real depth is not.

Expressions

No expression language, no linked properties, no wiggle. Animation is keyframes and curves, driven by hand.

Precomps

No nesting and no compositions inside compositions. The rack on a clip is the depth available, so a comp that would normally be built in three layers of precomps has nowhere to go.

Tracking and roto

No motion tracking, no planar tracking, no Roto Brush, no content-aware fill. Stabilisation exists and measures the camera's own path, but it cannot hand you a track to parent something to.

The ecosystem

No plugins, no templates, no render queue handed to a background encoder, and no project interchange in either direction. Nothing comes in but media, and nothing leaves but a finished file.

What is here

The rack is a stack of layers, and it behaves like one.

This is the part that is genuinely the same idea rather than a smaller version of it.

Effects go on a clip in order, and each row decides what it does to the picture that reached it: replace it, or blend with it out of eighteen modes. Any row can be masked by the row below — read as luma or as alpha, invertible — which is the mechanism a graduated blur, a textured glow and a shaped grade all come out of.

Rows switch off without being deleted, reorder by dragging, and every control on all of them keyframes. Effects with a position or an angle put a handle on the picture instead of a number field in a panel.

18 blend modes
Mask by the row below
Luma or alpha
Invertible
Bypass without deleting
GPU, no render step

Rows that composite, not just filter

Every row in the rack carries a blend mode — eighteen of them, the first fourteen working a channel at a time and the last four taken from the PDF spec every application gets them from. A row is a layer, not a slider.

Masking inside the rack

Any row can be masked by the one below it, read as luma or as alpha, and inverted. Put a Gradient Ramp under a blur and the blur is graduated; put Fractal Noise under it and it is textured.

Track mattes between lanes

A lane can matte the lanes beneath it, as luma or alpha. Mask groups are contiguous, because a stack composites in order.

Keyframes on every control

Not a subset. Every parameter of every one of the 76 filters keyframes, alongside position, scale, rotation, opacity and volume, with a curve editor, eight easings and handles you can drag.

Text animators with range selectors

The real model: selectors that count characters, words or lines, in percent or by index, with six falloff shapes, ease in and out of the range, and a randomiser with a stored seed. Selectors combine by add, subtract or intersect, and start, end and offset all keyframe.

Shape layers and solids

Draw paths with a pen tool in project pixels, or import an SVG and get its paths as one layer. Solids for the things a comp needs a plate for.

Gizmos on the picture

Effects that have a position, an angle or a corner put a handle on the canvas rather than a pair of number fields in a panel.

The animation

Keyframes on everything, and a curve to shape them with.

Every parameter of every effect keyframes, not a chosen few, and so do position, scale, rotation, opacity and volume. Tuning a control while the playhead sits somewhere sets a key there, which is the behaviour you already expect.

The curve editor takes it from there: eight easings to start from, and bezier handles to bend when none of them is the shape you meant. Keys travel with the clip when you move it.

The shelf

You will recognise most of the shelf by name.

The catalogue was built against the one you already know, so what you reach for is usually called what you expect. Separate implementations running as WebGL shaders — the same control, not the same pixel.

Black & White
Change Color
Change To Color
Tint
CC Toner
Colorama
Transform
Corner Pin
Bezier Warp
Warp
Optics Compensation
Spherize
Bulge
Magnify
Twirl
Ripple
Turbulent Displace
Smear
Mirror
Polar Coordinates
Fill
Gradient Ramp
4-Color Gradient
Checkerboard
Grid
Circle
Ellipse
Cell Pattern
Fractal Noise
Lens Flare
Beam
Lightning
Radio Waves
Scribble
Outline
Audio Spectrum
Audio Waveform
Shutter Blur
Echo
Posterize Time
Time Displacement
Time Difference

Those are four shelves of ten. The rest are blur, keying, matte, colour, stylize and motion — 76 filters altogether, every one of them free and none of them behind a plan.

What you would be working around

This is an editor with a compositor in it: Not the other way round. The timeline is the centre and the rack lives on a clip, so work that is mostly comping and barely cutting will feel like it is being done in the wrong window.
One rack deep: With no precomps, an effect chain cannot be collapsed and reused as an input. Long chains stay long.
Rendering is a tab that stays open: Export runs in the page on your own machine. There is no queue to hand it to and nothing to close it into the background.
Desktop browsers only: Chrome and Edge get everything including a save location. Firefox and Safari run the editor and write exports to Downloads.

Questions that decide it either way

Is there a free alternative to After Effects?: This is a partial one. The effect rack, blend modes, track mattes, keyframes with a curve editor and the text animators are all here and all free — 172 effects in total, no watermark, no account. There is no 3D, no expressions, no precomps and no tracking, which is a large part of what After Effects is.
Can I open my After Effects projects?: No. There is no importer for .aep or for any other application's project format. Your source media opens here normally; the comp would be rebuilt.
Does it have expressions?: No. There is no expression language and no way to link one property to another. Everything is keyframed by hand, with a curve editor and eight easings for the shaping.
Can it do motion tracking?: No. There is no point or planar tracking to parent a layer to. The two stabilisation effects measure the camera's path through the clip and undo it, which is a different job and the only one of the two it does.
Are the effects the same ones?: Many carry the same names and do the same thing — Colorama, CC Toner, Turbulent Displace, Corner Pin, Bezier Warp, Optics Compensation, Fractal Noise, Lens Flare, Echo, Time Displacement, Advanced Spill Suppressor. They are separate implementations running as WebGL shaders, so expect the same control and not the same pixel.
Can I animate text the way I do in After Effects?: Yes, and this is the closest correspondence in the product. Animators hold the property amounts and range selectors decide who gets them, by characters, words or lines, with falloff shapes, ease, randomisation and a keyframeable offset. Stack two animators and letters can slide in while a second one spins them.
Does it run on the GPU?: Yes. Effects are WebGL shaders and composite on your graphics card, so the rack scrubs without a render step. Export encodes on your own machine through WebCodecs.

The rest of it is free too

Open a tab and put four effects on a clip.

Open the editor

Free, no account, no watermark, and nothing uploaded.