When it comes to choosing the right motion animation format, designers and developers often weigh the pros and cons of a Lottie versus others. If you’re looking for a solution to create lightweight, scalable animations that seamlessly integrate across platforms and gives you freedom of choice, LottieFiles is a great platform for helping you get your static designs moving.
Below, we’ll highlight the advantages of using the Lottie format and highlight some of the key advantages of using LottieFiles to create, collaborate and implement motion.
Lottie and dotLottie file sizes
Why most people gravitate toward the Lottie format is due to its use of the open JSON format. Unlike other formats that can be more binary in nature, Lottie animations are transparent and allow for easier tweaking of the file - for example, you can quickly swap out content - and they give users a single source of truth for editing and playback.
They are also known for their remarkably small file sizes. Most Lottie animations average under 10KB, but there’s an even smaller and more optimized format now available, the dotLottie, which averages between 3-4KB. dotLottie is an evolution of the Lottie format, created to address some limitations of the original Lottie format. It's essentially a subset of Lottie that can include multiple Lottie animations, images, and other assets all packaged in a single file and still uses the .lottie extension. It allows the bundling of multiple animations in one file, supports including external assets (like images) within the file, and provides a better organization for complex animations. The best part, because dotLottie uses ZIP tech for compression, it can reduce your file size up to 80% more than a standard Lottie.
“With Lottie-based vector animation, I’m assured my work will display color correct, resolution independent, and with extremely small file sizes. All without compromise.” - Brian Lee, Senior Motion Designer at Headspace
Lottie: The industry standard for motion design
The Lottie format has gained widespread adoption, prompting a group of industry leaders to recognize the need for standardization. In response, they established the Lottie Animation Community (LAC), a non-profit organization under the Linux Foundation. The LAC's primary goal is to standardize an open format for vector animations, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and cross-platform compatibility. The organization's steering committee includes LottieFiles, and major entities such as Google, Airbnb, and other industry members. This collaborative effort aims to promote and refine the Lottie file format as an industry standard, emphasizing transparency and community involvement in its development process.
Reliable cross-platform support with dotLottie Runtimes
When it comes to implementation, we offer developers Lottie Runtimes, as well as independent runtimes and libraries to render Lottie animations. We are compatible with dozens of libraries and runtimes from other major tech companies and platforms including Google's Skottie, Samsung's rLottie, Airbnb's players for web, iOS, and Android, in addition to implementations for Windows and QT. Our diversity of runtimes sets Lottie apart from formats with single-player solutions, and this non-singular approach gives you more flexibility to use the runtime of your choice depending on your project needs.
To address the need for a universal player that performs consistently across all platforms, we recently introduced dotLottie Players as a new lightweight, multi-platform Lottie runtime that guarantees feature parity and performance across different platforms and frameworks - all while fully leveraging the extended features of both dotLottie and Lottie. Our dotLottie Players not only serve the smallest dotLottie format, but also work universally across popular platforms and frameworks including React, Node.js, Vue.js and more.
"Today’s experiences are not single applications; instead, they are designed to be used on all sorts of screen sizes and devices. Lottie’s ability to be scaled without quality loss means a single animation can be used in all of these interfaces, ensuring consistency for the user." - Jeff Clarke, ProtoPie Expert and Enterprise Trainer
Lottie isn’t just a format; It’s an entire ecosystem
Lottie isn’t just a file format. It’s a comprehensive, open ecosystem that empowers designers and developers with unparalleled flexibility. Design and animate in your tool of choice - be it Adobe After Effects, Figma, Jitter, Fable, Aninix, Flow, Cavalry, Keyshape, or dozens more. This pipeline-agnostic approach ensures you're never locked into a single workflow or tool. And for creators who prefer a dedicated space for all things motion, we also offer an end-to-end pipeline solution - the Lottie Creator.
Create, collaborate, and implement, all in one place with Lottie Creator
Lottie Creator is your dedicated, one-stop-shop for creating animations, collaborating with your team and stakeholders, and shipping animated designs. It’s packed with dozens of features for creating an animation from scratch - or you can choose from more than 100,000 free Lottie animations to kickstart your project, making it accessible to both novice and experienced designers.
A modern workflow and dedicated Workspaces
The LottieFiles' Workspace introduces a modern workflow for motion in products. It streamlines your entire animation process from creation to integration. You can store and access animations across your organization making edits easy for everyone - not just motion designers. You can also organize, test, and ship animations from one shared place, freeing you up for more complex projects and empowering your team members to review, approve, and export.
“Since Lottie integrates swiftly with my workflow and has a small footprint, I can hash out and share ideas with my teams rapidly. The LottieFiles site and platform enable me to easily upload, troubleshoot, share previews, and gather feedback. When working with Headspace engineers and designers, I can try out a lot of ideas quickly and without compatibility worries. That kind of freedom keeps me creative - and leaves fewer ideas on the cutting room floor.” - Brian Lee, Senior Motion Designer at Headspace
Easy implementation across the web, mobile apps, design mockups and more
With LottieFiles, you can take any free animation in our library – or animations that you or your team have created – and ship them anywhere. Lottie animations can be embedded on any sites that support the oEmbed format. This includes over 25,000 platforms – such as Notion, Medium, Ghost, Reddit and WordPress, as well as 50+ JavaScript libraries and frameworks including React, Vue, Node, and more.
You can also add Lottie animations to web pages with HTML. This can be useful if the platform you’re using doesn’t support embedding, or if you need more control over how your Lottie animation will play. Should you come across a platform that doesn’t support Lottie (yet), you can always export Lottie animations as GIFs or MP4 videos.
Access to the world’s largest collection of community-designed and customizable animations
We have the world’s largest public contribution library of more than 500,000 free and premium animations - spanning from UI elements to seasonal animations - that you can use, be inspired by, or customize. These animations were contributed by the world’s best motion designers and creators who wanted to give back to the community. They are free for commercial use and come with an attribution-free license. Simply search for what you need, and add it to your projects without the worry or hassle of licensing.
Built-in AI tools
LottieFiles harnesses the latest advancements in generative AI technology to push the boundaries of what's possible in design and animation. We strive to make motion design easier than ever, which is why we launched our newest AI development, Motion Copilot in the Lottie Creator. Describe your desired animation in any language, and Motion Copilot will generate keyframes that are smooth and precise. It can also answer any questions you have. Simply ask for guidance, and Motion Copilot will help you with suggestions and pointers.
The Lottie advantage
LottieFiles provides all the tools and flexibility you need to create, collaborate and implement animations. From our innovative dotLottie format to extensive integrations and plugins, we offer a comprehensive solution that empowers designers and developers to create with freedom and ease. And that freedom is really something we pride ourselves on, because after all, there’s no creativity without freedom. It’s also why more than 10 million designers and developers, and 280,000 teams choose LottieFiles today.
Want to see the impact for yourself? Check out our case studies to learn how teams from the world's top websites and apps use Lottie.
