Hi everyone, George here. And wow, has it been a year for Lottie.
Lottie has long been a staple of motion design. But if you think it is still just an animation format, then your info is out of date. Lottie are no longer “that JSON animation you drop into your project” (and it hasn’t been for a while now). Lottie in 2026 is so much more powerful than it was even just last year, with heaps of tooling, improvements, and features.
In 2026, Lottie animation files include:
- Regular static animations.
- State Machines and interactivity.
- Themes such as light/dark modes.
- Asset handling such as fonts, images, and separate animations.
- Compression of up to 90% compared to just a few years ago.
All of this is made possible with the dotLottie (.lottie) format, which is designed in the Lottie Creator with a wealth of advanced features and plugins. It’s hosted with our CDN and managed by our Digital Asset Management system.
This is the Lottie Power Stack 2026
Let me show you why more than 15 million designers and developers are already powering their motion with Lottie.
LottieFiles: Your MotionOS
Lottie Creator is the only design tool that is tailored for creating dotLottie, and it saw HUUGE improvements over the past year. Late 2025 saw a complete rewrite of Lottie Creator in order to prepare for the greater performance that our users were going to demand of it.
But that rewrite wasn’t just for performance; it enabled a ton of new features, such as:
- Support for State Machines, Theming, and Data Binding for enhanced interactivity.
- Easing Editor for getting everything dialed in just right.
- Advanced Duplicator to reduce repeated manual work.
- Physics Simulator for real gravity, force vector, and collision calculation enables some pretty impressive motion, like this realistic billiards break.
- A robust Plugin System, including several in-house plugins such Spring Curve, Motion Presets, SVGL Logos and more to come.
- Tons of AI features, including Prompt to Vector as well as Prompt to State Machines to handle all your interactivity logic.
Lottie Creator can be the source of animations or it can be a leg of the journey with our array of external plugins for tools like Figma and After Effects that allow you to bring your work in from elsewhere for refinement in Lottie Creator. However, for true motion-first interactivity, beginning in Lottie Creator is becoming the standard industry-wide.
dotLottie: “Look at Me, I’m the Captain Now.”
In 2025, dotLottie (.lottie) surpassed Lottie JSON as the choice file format for working designers and developers.
Even if you just want to make regular-old static animations, dotLottie boasts compression rates of up to 90% compared to its older brother, meaning faster load times on your projects and less memory clutter. And we’ve put a ton of effort into making sure the dotLottie players work on every corner of the internet.
And I mean a TON… Seriously though, this is my specific domain at LottieFiles and I can already tell I’m going to be organizing the maintenance of dotLottie runtime players until I pass it on to my children. Still worth it tho.
But on top of its tiny footprint and enhanced stability, dotLottie is what enables all of the enhanced features that the old Lottie format could never dream of. That’s more true now than ever before, as we have added support for bundling multiple animations, fonts, themes, images, state machines interactivity logic, and data-bound variables, all within the tiny dotLottie package.
(And don’t tell anyone, but I hear we’re about to cram even more useful stuff in there, like audio and video files).
State Machines and Data Binding
Kicking off late 2025, State Machines changed the game for motion, allowing for detailed logic-based interactivity right from the dotLottie.
No longer do designers need to explain motion to developers (akin to emailing a Word document in 2026 rather than sharing a Notion page). All of the logic can be designed once, as a single source of truth, and then handed off in a single inspectable dotLottie file to developers.
The only thing the developer needs to know about are the inputs that the designer specified in the dotLottie, enabling them to “push the buttons” of the interactive animation or inject data via code without needing to understand the logic themselves. This ensures that production looks and feels exactly as the designer intended, because the miscommunication risk has been virtually eliminated.
And of course, Data Binding… which technically hasn’t come out yet, but I’m just too damn excited about it not to gush a little bit.
AI-Powered Design
The Lottie Power Stack is a force to be reckoned with in the hands of a capable designer, but made even more formidable with our new AI tooling. Lottie Creator saw the introduction of a ton of AI tools in 2025, so I’ll keep it brief.
- Prompt to Vector: an AI specifically made for creating vector assets to quickly get you off the ground.
- Prompt to Themes: generate themes based on thoughts and ideas.
- Motion Copilot: save and retrieve standardized motion in your motion design system.
- Raster to Vector: turn raster images like .jpg or .png into fully editable vector images.
- Prompt to State Machines: my personal favorite, this AI generates your state machine logic for you, saving tons of time.
LottieFiles also provides many of these tools outside of Lottie Creator, meaning you don’t have to use Lottie Creator (even though you should).
Infrastructure Upon Infrastructure
The Lottie Power Stack isn’t just a bunch of awesome features, but also the foundation of tons of tools to make your life easier. We maintain an array of plugins and integrations within other tools that enable you to take advantage of the stack wherever your project calls home. Check us out on…
And don’t forget our CDN, which allows you to deploy your interactive animations by just pasting a link into your code, or even by just pasting directly into a Notion document or the design tool of your choice. And with better version control on the way, this link becomes the single source of truth across all your platforms while still giving you the option to download and manage directly.
What Else You Might Have Missed in 2025
A lot happened outside Lottie Creator this year too. Some of these updates were small and easy to miss, but together they made the whole workflow feel a lot smoother. Here are a few worth calling out.
- SVG to Lottie now lives right inside your workspace, which means you can drop in an SVG, pick a preset, and boom, you have motion. It is one of those features you use once and immediately wonder why it was ever anywhere else.
- Accessibility Analyzer gives your animations a quick health check for things like contrast, readability, and motion sensitivity. It is simple, fast, and honestly something we should have built ages ago.
- LottieFiles for After Effects got a serious performance bump this year. Faster renders, better previews, bulk exporting that does not make you want to take a walk outside. Plus blend modes and SVG import, which the AE folks have been begging us for.
- Figma Slides, Figma Sites and Figma Buzz now support the LottieFiles plugin, which means you can throw motion straight into your decks, website or quick visual mocks without opening another tool.
- Lottie to Google Ads dotLottie files also have strong integration with Google Ads, meaning you can now ship all of your ad variants, including themes and localizations, all within a single dotLottie for easier management and versioning. Expect this to get massively expanded soon, as well!
The breakthroughs. The moments when everything clicked. The launches that made us rethink what motion can do. And the community creations that reminded us why any of this is worth building in the first place.
Everything that made 2025 a wild and transformative year for LottieFiles is packed into this one video. Enjoy the ride.
And trust me… we are only getting started for 2026.
A Massive Community
I already mentioned how more than 15 million designers and developers use the Lottie Power Stack, including over 280,000 companies, but honestly it never stops blowing my mind. The people using Lottie every day, giving feedback, sharing files, remixing ideas, building wild things, that is the real engine behind everything we do.
With hundreds of thousands of animations in the library, from simple icons to full interactive dotLottie, the community is easily my favorite part of this whole stack. It is where the best ideas come from, and where we see the impact of the work more than anywhere else.
Real Companies Got Real Results
Some of my favorite moments this year came from watching teams use Lottie Creator and LottieFiles in their actual day to day work. Not the glamorous stuff. The real product work that ships.
We saw onboarding flows that felt more human, interaction patterns that reacted with a little more life, and brand moments that finally made it past the marketing site and into the product where people can actually feel them. And then there were the physics experiments, the ones we replayed way too many times because they were just that fun.
The tools matter, sure, but the people using them matter way more. As we wrap up the year, it feels right to call out the teams and creators who pushed the boundaries of what motion can be inside a real product, not just inside a portfolio.
Need a Little Guidance?
If all of this has you excited but you are not totally sure where to begin, you are not alone. A lot of teams feel that way, which is exactly why we started offering free one on one sessions with our motion experts. These came directly from community requests, and they have turned into one of the most helpful things we do.
These sessions are great for:
- Design system teams trying to build motion tokens or patterns that developers can actually use
- Product designers who keep hearing “engineering says no”
- Engineering leads who want a clear answer to “Which player should we standardize on”
- Motion designers looking to move from one off hero animations to real product motion
You do not need to be an expert. You just need a real product and a willingness to ship. In each session we pull from the full Lottie Power Stack so you can make real decisions, not guesses.
From all of us at LottieFiles, thank you for creating with us. We cannot wait to see what you build in 2026.
