Hugo North

Oct 29, 2022

Best React Animation Libraries

In this article, we will cover the following animation libraries for React:

1- React Spring

2- Framer Motion

3- React Transition Group

4- React Motion

5- React Move

6- Remotion

7- React Reveal

1- React Spring:

React Spring is a modern animation library that is based on spring physics. It’s highly flexible and covers most animations needed for a user interface. React Spring inherits some properties from React Motion, such as ease of use, interpolation, and performance.

2- Framer Motion

Framer Motion is a popular React animation library that makes creating animations easy. It boasts a simplified API that abstracts the complexities behind animations and allows developers to create animations with ease. Even better, it has support for server-side rendering, gestures, and CSS variables.

Overall, Framer Motion is a very strong, highly customizable, and powerful library.

Framer Motion has a much larger bundle size than React Spring and is not as popular in terms of stars, but its documentation is somewhat easier to understand and merits consideration for your next React project.

3- React Transition Group:

React Transition Group is a development tool that reduces the need for boilerplate code to the nearest minimum. Unlike many other React animation libraries, such as React Spring , React Transition Group uses simple components to define animations.

The library does not define styles itself, but instead manipulates the DOM in useful ways, making it much more comfortable for developers to implement transitions and animations. In other words, the React Transition Group library offers a more straightforward approach to animations and transitions.

React Transition Group uses built-in components such as Transition to add animations and transitions to elements, thereby separating your elements from your animations.

React Transition Group is a good animation library and has a very small bundle size. It’s one of the most popular animation libraries and should be considered for your next React project.

4- React Motion:

React Motion is a popular React animation library that boasts an easier approach to create and implement realistic animations. It makes use of physics laws to create natural-looking animations for React elements.

Overall, React Motion is a sound animation library for your React application, especially with its almost lifelike animation behavior.

5- React Move:

React Move is a library designed for creating beautiful and data-driven animations. It was designed to support TypeScript out of the box and also supports custom tweening functions.

Tweening is short for “inbetweening,” the process of generating images for frame-by-frame animation between keyframes. React Move also features lifecycle events in its transitions, as well as allowing developers to pass on custom tweens in their animations.

React Move is growing in popularity among the developer community. This library can be used for all kinds of React animations and transitions. It shines more with its custom tweening, which gives developers more power to customize animations in their React applications.

6- Remotion:

The Remotion React library was created in 2021. It was designed to create animations using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

With Remotion, you can create videos as well as play and review them on your browser while using React components and compositions. Remotion also allows React developers to scale video animation and production using server-side rendering and parametrization.

Parametrization is the process of finding equations of curves and surfaces using equations, which can be very useful in creating meshes for videos.

7- React Reveal:

React Reveal is a high-performance and easy-to-use library for adding animations to React applications. Unlike most animation libraries, React Reveal only reveals animations and effects if you scroll down to the animated element, not during load time. This improves page speed by allowing animation components to be lazy-loaded.

It’s also important to note that React Reveal supports higher order components for some of its features.

Though this is a newer animation library, as you can see from its growing popularity, React Reveal is here to stay!

Conclusion

Regardless of the project you’re working on, numerous animation libraries exist that can help you create user-friendly animations and transitions easily and quickly.

Out of this list and as of this writing, React Spring has the most stars on GitHub, while React Transition Group wins in terms of weekly downloads on NPM. However, other libraries may offer specific features that you need, such as tweening with React Move or lifelike animations with React Motion.

A lot of these libraries are customizable and include great built-in features and changes. Hopefully, with this comparison list, you can choose the right library for your next React application.

Source: www.blog.logrocket.com