GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) is a robust JavaScript animation library built for programmatic control over DOM, SVG, and canvas elements through imperative APIs and timeline sequences. Lottie-react is a React wrapper for Airbnb's Lottie library, designed to render animations exported from Adobe After Effects as JSON, enabling designers to create motion graphics that play back directly in the browser.
This comparison matters because the two tools solve animation problems from opposite directions: GSAP empowers developers to code complex, interactive animations with precise control, while lottie-react lets designers own the animation process, delivering pre-baked vector motions with minimal developer intervention. Teams choosing between them are essentially deciding whether animations should live in code or in design files.
Choose GSAP when you need interactive, dynamic animations controlled by code—scroll-triggered parallax effects, game UI, data visualizations, or any motion that responds to user input or application state. It's the right tool when developers own the animation logic and need performance at scale. The imperative API pays off for complex sequences that would be impossible to pre-render, and the bundle cost is justified by eliminating large JSON assets.
Choose lottie-react when designers create animations in After Effects that need pixel-perfect reproduction across platforms, especially for brand animations, loading states, onboarding flows, or micro-interactions. It wins when design iteration speed matters more than runtime flexibility, and when your team wants designers to own motion without developer bottlenecks. Accept the larger payload if your animations are infrequent or if cross-platform consistency (web + mobile native) justifies the asset overhead.