Framer vs Rive
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
What Framer is
Framer is a website builder in which the design canvas and the live site are the same thing. Pages and interactions are laid out visually, and the result is published straight from the tool, so there is no separate handoff step where a design is rebuilt in code. A content management system sits behind the canvas for structuring and editing content, which keeps repeated content separate from the layout that presents it. Content can be edited without opening the design files, which matters once a site is live and being updated by someone other than its designer. Forms and analytics collect data from visitors, and there are SEO controls aimed at search visibility. AI assistive agents can help build a project inside the editor. Collaboration is included from the free plan, which allows up to three editors; further editors cost $20 per month each on top of the plan. Some capabilities are add-ons rather than plan features. Localisation translates and adapts a site into other languages, and A/B testing is bought the same way. Certain features are priced by usage, and the free plan includes 500 credits for trying them before committing. Publishing is a single step from the editor: a site is set up, designed on the canvas, then launched from the same place. Because pricing scales with the projects a site owner runs, bandwidth allowances and add-ons account for much of the difference between plans. All prices are monthly. Framer is free to start. Basic costs $10 a month and includes 50 GB of bandwidth. Pro costs $30 a month and doubles that to 100 GB. Custom domains are available across plans. Enterprise pricing is bespoke and adds enterprise-grade security and an uptime guarantee, with the emphasis on scaling to larger teams. An API is available for integrations, and Framer connects to external tools. The company publishes guidance on accessibility, aimed at making sites usable by everyone, and runs a community space where people share work. Framer states that it protects sites and the data on them, with the strongest security controls reserved for the Enterprise plan.
What Rive is
Rive is a design tool for interactive animation that combines a vector editor, a timeline animator and an interactivity layer in one application. The file built in the editor is the file that ships in the app. Graphics are drawn by a GPU accelerated vector rendering engine, and the average Rive file is about 43 KB. The State Machine links animations with conditional transitions, so a graphic reacts to user input, screen size, scroll position and application state. Data Binding connects text, colours, layouts and other properties to live application data at runtime, and Events let a Rive graphic notify the host application when a meaningful state change occurs. Text can be replaced at runtime and supports any language, while fonts, images and audio can be loaded as dynamic assets rather than embedded in the file. Responsive layouts let a component reflow and resize to fit its container, and scripting in the Luau language covers custom and procedural behaviour. Rive imports SVG vectors, raster images in PNG, JPEG and WebP, and PSD files with their layers preserved. Animation covers skeletal rigs with bones, inverse kinematics and constraints, plus mesh deformation with vertex weighting. A cloud renderer outputs video, GIF and PNG sequences. Runtimes are published for Web, React, React Native, Flutter, Apple, Android, Unity, Unreal, C++, Defold, Framer, Webflow and Wix Studio, all open source under the MIT licence. The Free plan costs nothing per seat and allows unlimited personal files but only three collaborative files, one project and one workspace. It caps each imported asset at 10 MB and provides no exports, no revision history and no CDN hosting. Cadet is $9 per seat per month for a maximum of three seats, raises the asset cap to 100 MB and lifts the limits on collaborative files, projects and exports, including .riv files. Voyager is $32 per seat per month for up to 25 seats and adds libraries, hosted embed URLs and unlimited revision history. Enterprise is $120 per seat per month and adds unlimited subteam workspaces, custom S3 bucket storage, SSO and SOC 2 Type II. Paid plans can be billed monthly or yearly.
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