LottieFiles vs Spline
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
| LottieFiles | Spline | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Design | Design |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Price from | Freemium | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 18 | 14 |
| What it does | Vector animations that ship as JSON and stay sharp at any size. | 3D scenes for the web, built in a browser and embedded like an image. |
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.
What Spline is
Spline is a design tool for building 3D scenes in a browser and publishing them to the web. It ships two editors, a 3D editor and a 2D editor called Hana. The two share the same interactivity model and the same publishing pipeline, so they are two halves of one tool rather than separate products. Scenes render using WebGPU and fall back to WebGL. There is also a desktop app for macOS and Windows that supports tabs, offline-friendly editing, MCP and system fonts. The 3D editor goes past modelling into behaviour. It includes physics simulation, a particle system and first-person and third-person game controls, which makes it possible to build a scene a visitor can move around in. Imports cover OBJ, FBX with animation and rigs, STL, GLTF, GLB and 3D Gaussian Splats. Exports cover GLTF, GLB, STL, USDZ, OBJ and Spline's own file format, with stills as PNG or JPG and motion as WebM, MP4 or an image sequence. Hana is the 2D editor, with vector networks, booleans, gradients, glass and 3D projection effects, and it publishes to Webflow, Framer, Wix Studio, HTML and JS, Notion and Shopify. On the 3D side, Spline exports code for React projects and offers integrations for Webflow, Framer, Wix Studio, Next.js, Swift and Kotlin. Which of those outputs are actually available depends on the plan. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 2,000 AI credits a month, but web exports carry a Spline watermark. Hobby, at 12 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 15 USD billed monthly, removes the watermark and raises the allowance to 3,000 credits. Pro costs 25 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 30 USD monthly, and is the first plan that can export to Apple and Android apps and to USDZ and STL files. Max costs 60 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 70 USD monthly, includes 10,000 credits, caps video assets at 100 MB, and is where self-hosted export, code export and file version history become available. SAML single sign-on and centralised billing are reserved for the Enterprise plan, which is priced individually and billed annually.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.