By Mehdi HassanRive and Lottie both put sharp, vector animation on a website without a video file. They solve different problems, though, and picking the wrong one means either rebuilding an animation or wiring interactivity by hand that the other tool gives you for free. This comparison is part of our website animation guide, and it assumes you've already decided the animation has a job on the page.
Rive vs Lottie: what's the difference?
Lottie is an animation file format for playing back timelines, usually exported from After Effects, while Rive is a design tool and runtime built for interactive animation driven by state machines. A Lottie file describes what happens over time. A Rive file describes states and the rules for moving between them, so the same file can idle, react to a hover and play a success animation on click.
Lottie | Rive | |
|---|---|---|
What it is | Open animation format (JSON or dotLottie) | Editor plus runtimes for its .riv format |
Made in | After Effects with an exporter, or Lottie tools | The Rive editor |
Interactivity | Play, pause, loop, segments; logic lives in your code | State machines with inputs and data binding built in |
Web rendering | SVG or canvas player in JavaScript | JavaScript plus WebAssembly, drawn to a canvas |
Best at | Illustrated loops, icons, onboarding visuals | Interactive buttons, toggles, characters, explainers |
Skills needed | Motion designer who knows After Effects | Designer who knows Rive's editor and state machines |
The rest of this article goes through each row in practice. The short version: if the animation only needs to play, Lottie is usually simpler. If it needs to respond, Rive usually is.
When is Lottie the better choice?
Lottie is the better choice for illustrated, brand-styled animations that play on their own: concept loops, animated icons, empty states and onboarding visuals. Most motion designers already work in After Effects, so a Lottie export fits the workflow you probably have. Files can be delivered as plain JSON or in the dotLottie format, and LottieFiles' documentation lists dotLottie players for web, React, Vue, iOS and Android.
Pros
- Fits an existing After Effects workflow and skill set
- Huge library of ready-made animations to adapt
- Supported natively by Webflow and by many site builders
- Simple to drop in when the animation only needs to play
Cons
- Interactivity has to be wired in code, frame ranges and all
- Complex files with masks, effects or embedded images get heavy
- Not every After Effects feature exports cleanly
- Text is usually outlined shapes, not readable text
The main risk with Lottie is weight that nobody checks. A file exported with hundreds of layers or embedded raster images can be slow to parse and hard on a phone's processor. Our guide to animated product demos covers when Lottie beats video or code for explaining a product.
When is Rive the better choice?
Rive is the better choice when the animation should react to the visitor: hover and press states, toggles, animated characters, progress indicators or a small interactive explainer. Rive's state machines let a designer define states and transitions in the editor, so the developer connects inputs rather than choreographing frames in code. Rive's web documentation also describes data binding through view models, which lets a page feed values into the animation.
Pros
- Interactivity is designed in the editor, not hand-coded
- One file can hold idle, hover, active and success states
- Runtimes for web and native apps share the same file
- Rive's documentation describes a smaller canvas-lite web package for simpler files
Cons
- Needs a designer who knows the Rive editor
- The web runtime loads WebAssembly, which adds a fixed cost
- Draws to a canvas, so accessible text needs separate handling
- Fewer ready-made assets to start from than Lottie
Rive shines in micro-interactions that carry brand personality, like a toggle with a character that reacts, and in product teams that want the same animation on the website and in a native app. Rive's web docs recommend the WebGL2 package, which uses the same renderer as the Rive editor, so what the designer sees is what ships.
How do Rive and Lottie compare on performance?
Neither format is fast or slow by default; file complexity, the number of instances on the page and when they load decide the cost. Lottie's cost grows with layers, masks and effects, because the player rebuilds frames in JavaScript. Rive adds a WebAssembly runtime up front, then renders efficiently on a canvas, so it suits pages where one runtime drives several animations.
- Lazy-load below the fold. Neither should compete with the hero for bandwidth. Load the player when the animation's section nears the viewport.
- Keep the hero headline outside the animation. If the largest element waits on a player, Largest Contentful Paint suffers. web.dev defines a good LCP as 2.5 seconds or less.
- Pause what's off screen. Stop loops that scroll out of view so they don't keep using the main thread or GPU.
- Test on a mid-range phone. Desktop machines hide the processor cost of complex vector animation.
If you're weighing the page-level impact, our explainer on Core Web Vitals covers the three metrics in plain terms, and fast landing pages shows how to keep motion inside a performance budget.
For example, suppose one landing page needs both
For example, suppose a fintech landing page has a looping illustration of money moving between accounts in the how-it-works section, and an animated toggle in the pricing table that switches between monthly and annual billing.
The illustration only needs to play, and the motion designer works in After Effects, so it ships as a Lottie, lazy-loaded and paused off screen. The pricing toggle has two states and a transition, and the brand wants a small character to react when it flips, so it's a Rive file with a boolean input wired to the toggle's state. The real pricing numbers stay as HTML text next to it, so they're readable, translatable and indexable.
Shipping both runtimes on one page is a cost, so the team would first ask whether the toggle could be plain CSS. Only if the character matters to the brand does Rive earn its place.
Which works on Webflow, Framer and Next.js?
Webflow supports Lottie natively and Rive through an integration, Next.js can run either through their official JavaScript and React packages, and Framer support depends on the components currently available. Platform features change often, so check each platform's current documentation before you commit an animation plan to it.
Platform | Lottie | Rive |
|---|---|---|
Webflow | Native Lottie element | Rive's web runtime names Webflow; check Webflow's current docs |
Framer | Check the current Insert menu and marketplace | Check the current Insert menu and marketplace |
Next.js or React | Official players, including dotLottie for React | Official web runtime with React wrappers |
Native apps | dotLottie players for iOS and Android | Native runtimes share the same .riv file |
On a Framer site, we confirm the component before the motion designer starts, because an animation that can't be embedded cleanly ends up as a video. Our Framer development work includes checking that kind of fit early, so motion assets aren't redone at build time.
How do you make Rive and Lottie animations accessible?
Treat both as images that move: give them a text alternative, a pause option for long loops and a reduced-motion version. Both draw outside the page's normal text, so a screen reader gets nothing unless you add a label, and any words inside the animation can't be selected, translated or read by assistive technology.
- Label it. Give purely decorative animations an empty or hidden role, and meaningful ones a short accessible name that says what they show.
- Pause long loops. WCAG's Pause, Stop, Hide criterion covers moving content that starts automatically and lasts more than five seconds alongside other content.
- Honor reduced motion. Under prefers-reduced-motion, show a static frame or the end state instead of playing the loop.
- Keep important text in HTML. Headlines, prices and calls to action belong in the page, not inside the animation.
For an interactive Rive element, make sure the real control is a focusable HTML button or input that drives the animation's state, so keyboard users can operate it. The implementation patterns are in accessible animation.
Should you use Rive, Lottie or neither on a landing page?
Use neither when the animation needs to show real product UI with readable text; coded animation or short video does that better. Rive and Lottie are strongest for illustration and brand moments, not for explaining a dense interface. If the goal is a product walkthrough buyers can click through, an interactive demo is a different decision entirely.
Before choosing a format, ask whether the motion helps conversion at all. Our look at landing page animation covers which kinds of motion help buyers act and which only slow them down. If an animation can't name its job in one sentence, cutting it is often the best format choice. Our landing page design process starts from the copy for that reason.
