Free motion graphics software
Free motion graphics software, with nothing held back
Premation is a free motion graphics editor for macOS and Windows. Free here means the complete editor: no trial clock, no watermark on export and no locked tier of tools. It is also open source, which is why it can stay that way.
What free covers
Every tool
Compositions and pre-comps, keyframes with a Bézier graph editor, track mattes and blend modes, 2.5D cameras and lights, bones and IK, shape operators, text animators, particles and point tracking. None of it sits behind a plan.
Every export, without a watermark
MP4, ProRes 4444 and WebM with alpha, Lottie JSON, GIF and image sequences, rendered on your own machine. The file you get is the file you made.
An account is free, and optional
The installers from GitHub Releases are the hosted builds: you sign in with a free account and your projects can sync between machines. Build the local edition from the repository instead and there is no account at all — projects are .motion bundles on your own disk.
Motion graphics or motion design — same tool
The two names describe one kind of work: type, shapes, logos and footage animated on a timeline. Premation is built for it the way After Effects is, with the same layer model and the same shortcuts, so tutorials for one mostly apply to the other.
What free does not cover
More than 5 cloud projects, and version history past 7 days. That is Premation Cloud, $9 a month or $90 a year — the hosting, never the editor or its exports. Over the free allowance, extra cloud projects turn read-only; nothing is deleted.
Questions
- Is there free motion graphics software like After Effects?
- Premation is one. It uses After Effects' model — compositions, layers, keyframes, a graph editor, track mattes, nulls, Classic 3D — and its keyboard shortcuts. Where After Effects is still ahead (effect breadth, the plugin ecosystem, how proven tracking and Roto Brush are) is stated plainly on the comparison page.
- Does the free version add a watermark?
- No. There is no separate free version: the download is the whole editor, and nothing it exports carries a watermark.
- Can I use it for commercial work?
- Yes. What you make with Premation is yours to sell. The AGPL licence governs the software itself — it asks for your source changes only if you distribute or host a modified version of the editor.
- Is it good free motion design software for beginners?
- The Motion Academy on this site walks through the editor with interactive lessons, starting from a first keyframe. Because the workflow matches After Effects, most general motion design tutorials apply too.
- Does it run on Linux?
- Not as a release yet. The installers are for Windows and macOS; the open-source local edition can be built from the repository with Node 20.