vawe vs Lottie.
Lottie is a file format for vector animation that apps play at run time. vawe renders a film to MP4. They overlap only when you want a Lottie animation as video. This page explains the line between them.
Facts read from Lottie's own pages on 2026-10-03. Sources are listed at the end. vawe runs on your machine, needs no account and has no per-render fee.
Choose Lottie when
- You ship an animated icon, loader or illustration inside an app or web page.
- A motion designer works in After Effects and exports with Bodymovin.
- You need the animation to stay small and interactive at run time.
- You do not need video, audio or arbitrary HTML in the animation.
Choose vawe when
- You want an MP4 film, with audio, from a page you can write in code.
- You need HTML layout, text, video clips, canvas or three.js in the same film.
- You want an agent to write the file in web code it already knows.
- You want motion blur and the same frames on every render.
What Lottie is.
Lottie is an open-source vector animation file format, first made in 2015 as an export format for Adobe After Effects. A player draws the JSON in an app or on the web. It is not a video renderer.
Side by side.
| feature | Lottie | vawe |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Open vector animation file format with players | Framework to make films from one HTML page |
| Licence | lottie-web and dotlottie-web: MIT; the spec: Community Specification License 1.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Authoring model | JSON exported from After Effects with Bodymovin, or made in LottieFiles Creator | One HTML page: CSS, Web Animations, SVG, canvas, three.js |
| Rendering | A runtime player draws it (lottie-web: SVG, Canvas, HTML); not an MP4 renderer | Headless Chrome seeks and screenshots each frame; encodes one MP4 |
| Agent support | LottieFiles offers a Creator MCP server and a hosted MCP server | bin/vawe CLI and skills for writing, critiquing and judging a film |
| Content it can hold | Vector shapes and animation | Anything a browser draws, plus audio |
Where Lottie is stronger.
- Playback in products. One Lottie file plays on the web, iOS, Android and embedded devices, and can react to clicks and hover.
- File size. The dotLottie container compresses animations and shares assets.
- A standard. The format has a spec, a validator and a list of implementations, and a non-profit community hosted by the Linux Foundation.
- Reach. The lottie-web repo shows about 32,100 stars.
Questions people ask.
- Can Lottie export to MP4?
- The Lottie players do not make MP4. LottieFiles lists MP4, WebM and GIF among the export formats of its own tools. vawe renders MP4 from an HTML page directly.
- Is Lottie the same as After Effects?
- No. Lottie is a file format. It was first made as an export format for After Effects, and Bodymovin is the plugin that exports it.
- Can I use a Lottie animation inside a vawe film?
- vawe pages can use any web library, but this page has not tested a Lottie player with the seek clock, so it makes no claim.
- Is Lottie free?
- The formats and players are MIT-licensed. LottieFiles plan prices are not stated here because the pricing page did not load when this page was written.
Try vawe on one page.
Write a page, run one command, get an MP4. The quickstart takes a few minutes.