Rive vs Spline
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
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.
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.
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