Canva vs LottieFiles
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
| Canva | LottieFiles | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Design | Design |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Price from | Freemium | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 9 | 18 |
| What it does | Templates for everything, for people who do not design for a living. | Vector animations that ship as JSON and stay sharp at any size. |
What Canva is
Canva is a browser-based design editor, and its developer documentation sets out two distinct ways to work with it in code: apps that run inside the Canva editor, and the Connect API, which drives Canva from another system. A Canva app is a plugin built with standard web technologies such as JavaScript, rendered inside an iframe in the editor's object panel. Three pieces make one up: the Apps SDK, the App UI Kit and the Fetch API for calls out to a backend. A finished app is either distributed publicly through the Apps Marketplace or shared privately with team members only. Local development uses the Canva CLI, installed from an npm package published by Canva, and expects Node.js v24 and npm v11, with the development server running on port 8080. The Connect API works the other way round, letting an external application create and retrieve work in a Canva account. It authenticates with OAuth 2.0 using the authorisation code flow plus PKCE with SHA-256, and Canva publishes the OpenAPI specification on its developer site. An integration is either public, which means passing a Canva review, or private, which is restricted to Canva Enterprise customers. Through the API, a design can be created from four presets (doc, email, presentation and whiteboard) or at custom dimensions between 40 and 8000 pixels on each side, with a total area no greater than 25,000,000 square pixels. Assets can be uploaded: images up to 50 MB as JPEG, PNG, HEIC, single-frame GIF, TIFF or single-frame WEBP, and video up to 500 MB as M4V, MKV, MP4, MPEG, QuickTime or WebM. Autofill populates image, text, chart and sheet fields in a design, which is the mechanism behind generating many designs from one data source, though the acting user must belong to a Canva Enterprise organisation. Brand templates can be listed 25 at a time by default and 100 at most per request, and require a Canva Pro, Canva Teams or Canva Enterprise plan. Exports are produced as JPG, PNG, GIF, PPTX, MP4, PDF, an HTML bundle or standalone HTML. MP4 is available at 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4K in horizontal or vertical orientation, PDFs at A4, A3, letter or legal, and JPG, PNG and GIF images between 40 and 25,000 pixels. Plan level reaches into the API here: Pro export quality, lossy PNG compression and transparent PNG backgrounds all need a Canva Pro level plan, and on the free plan a fixed-dimension design cannot be upscaled on export by more than 1.125 times. Rate limits are counted per user of an integration: 20 design creations per minute, 30 asset uploads, 60 autofills and 100 brand template listings. Exports are governed more tightly, at 750 per five minute window and 5,000 per 24 hours for the integration, and 500 per 24 hours for any single user.
What LottieFiles is
LottieFiles is a set of tools for creating, storing and shipping Lottie animations. A Lottie is a JSON based animation file format that can be delivered to any platform as easily as a static asset, and because it is vector based it scales across device sizes without pixelation. The format itself is open source under the MIT licence and not tied to a single vendor. dotLottie is a packaging layer over Lottie JSON, and the documentation covers when to choose each of the two. Lottie Creator is the browser based editor for building and editing these files. It supports keyframes with easing and interpolation, layers, imported assets, nested scenes, trim path, gradient fills, segments and mattes, animates imported SVG files, and handles kinetic typography for text. Its plugins include Duplicator, AI Prompt to Vector and Motion Copilot. For designers working elsewhere, there are plugins for Figma, After Effects and Canva, with the Figma plugin adding raster to vector conversion and an AI prompt to vector tool. Playback is handled by published runtimes for JavaScript, React, Vue, Svelte, React Native, Flutter, iOS and Android. The core web player is on npm, renders both dotLottie and Lottie JSON, and has dedicated wrapper packages for React, Vue, Svelte and Web Components around a framework agnostic core. The dotLottie runtime APIs are TypeScript first, and the web player exposes control over playback, layout, theming, multi animation files and interactive state machines, with documentation covering web worker and GPU rendering options. dotLottie rendering uses the ThorVG graphics library. One caveat is worth knowing before a complex animation is committed to: Lottie does not support every Adobe After Effects feature, and per platform compatibility tables list the gaps. Expressions, images, text glyphs, masks, interpolation, strokes and fills are among the properties supported across platforms. Four plan tiers are sold: Free, Individual, Team and Enterprise. Individual adds private projects and private uploads for solo users. Team is positioned for commercial work by teams of fewer than ten, with a shared workspace and shared team assets. Enterprise is aimed at teams of ten or more and adds SSO, custom permissions, priority support, custom integrations and audit features. Subscriptions are billed annually and there is no standard monthly payment plan. Adding a team member part way through a term triggers an immediate pro rated charge equal to the monthly rate multiplied by the months remaining, though a seat freed by a departing member can be reassigned to a replacement at no extra charge. Premium animations come only with a paid subscription and cannot be bought one at a time. Students and educators over 13 at institutions in 15 supported countries can apply for the Education Plan, a free workspace that runs for a year and renews by repeating the verification. It excludes premium animations and the file optimiser, and forbids commercial use such as advertising, monetised content and paid client work.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.