Premation vs After Effects

Name: Premation
Author: Premation

Feature by feature, with the places After Effects wins stated first. Every number on this page was read out of the source, not out of a brochure.

Download for Windows

Free · AGPL-3.0 · no account

Coming from something else? Rive, Jitter, LottieFiles and Blender are compared too. Or read what open source means here.

The short version

Across 29 areas below: Premation is ahead on 9, level on 12, and behind on 8. Those 8 are the ones worth reading first.

Where After Effects wins

Effect breadth: 275 against 400-plus once third parties are counted.
Plugins. Premation's SDK now goes past effects — commands, panels, importers, export formats — and has a store, but the store only opened in 1.0, After Effects plugins do not load, and there is no scripting language.
Tracking and rotoscoping. Premation now has point, planar, camera and face tracking and a model-driven Roto Brush, but they are newer and less proven on hard footage than mocha, the camera tracker and Roto Brush 3.
Thirty years of ecosystem: tutorials, templates, plugins, and people who already know it.
Opening its own projects. Premation opens .aep and .aepx files as a conversion with a report, and shape-layer contents do not come across yet.
Maturity. Premation reached 1.0 in October 2026, one week after its native engine first shipped in 0.9.0. That is weeks of use, not years.

Where they are level

Keyframes, the value-and-speed graph editor, and per-keyframe interpolation.
The Classic 3D layer model: cameras, lights, shadows, motion blur.
Text animators with the full range and wiggly selector stack, plus right-to-left and vertical text.
Masks with variable feather, track mattes, precomps, and all 38 blend modes.
An audio panel with keyframeable level and pan, and the audio effects added in After Effects 26.3.

Where Premation wins

A real skeleton rig. After Effects has no bone system at all — its users buy DUIK for this.
AI built into the document model, with 73 typed tools, not a text-to-video box bolted on the side — and Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Antigravity can work in the open project from outside the app.
One engine for everything you see and export. The viewport, Export, the Render Queue and the command line all render through the same native engine, so the final file cannot disagree with the preview.
Free and AGPL-3.0, against a subscription.

Feature by feature

Animation

Keyframes: AEAny numeric property; PremationAny numeric property; Even; Interpolation is per-keyframe rather than per-property in both.
Graph editor: AEValue and speed curves; PremationValue and speed curves; Even; Bezier handles work on linear keys too, with tangent alignment.
Expressions: AEJavaScript, very large API; PremationOwn language, cycle-safe; After Effects; Smaller surface, and not general JavaScript. It runs inside the native engine and cannot loop forever on a self-referencing property.
Motion blur: AEAngle, phase, adaptive; PremationAngle, phase, adaptive; Even

Compositing

Blend modes: AE38; Premation38; Even; All of After Effects' modes, Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve included.
Effects: AE400+ with third parties; Premation275 built in; After Effects; Still the real gap on this page, and a smaller one than it was: 275 across twelve browser folders, all properly parameterised. 1.0 added sixty, among them Brightness & Contrast, Calculations, Caustics, Shatter, Wave World, Basic 3D and CC WarpoMatic, plus looks such as VHS, Halation, Light Leaks and Tilt-Shift. Breadth is breadth, but the families an AE user reaches for daily — blur, grade, key, distort, transition — are covered. In 0.9.0, before those sixty were added, all 393 effect benchmark cases ran above 24 fps in the repo's own benchmark; that measures this engine, and is not a comparison with After Effects.
Layer styles: AE9; Premation10, on the GPU; Premation; All nine of After Effects', plus Glass, which resolves against what is composited behind the layer rather than compiling to an effect. Moving layer styles to the GPU in 0.9.0 took an Inner Shadow on a 1080p layer from about a second per frame to 3 ms.
Masks: AEBezier, 7 modes, variable feather; PremationBezier, 7 modes, variable feather; Even; Since 1.0 the engine draws per-vertex feather, set with the Mask Feather tool; before that it fell back to the uniform feather. A mask can scope an individual effect.
Track mattes: AEAlpha and luma, invertible; PremationAlpha and luma, invertible; Even; The matte does not have to sit directly above its target in either.

3D and rigging

3D model: AEClassic, and Advanced 3D with glTF and PBR; PremationClassic, extrusion and bevels, glTF, OBJ, FBX and USD models with PBR maps; After Effects; Imports .glb, .gltf, .obj, .fbx, .usda and .usdz (each converted to glTF on the way in) with skinning, morph targets and the glTF PBR map set; shadow-mapped lights, SSAO, fog, image-based lighting from an image, EXR or Radiance .hdr sky, reflections of the environment and of other 3D layers, and height displacement. Since 1.0 a 3D layer's effect chain is cached and sized to the layer, and shadow maps, SSAO and reflections are reused between frames when nothing they depend on moved. Transparency is a Fresnel-faded alpha rather than a refraction, and there is no Substance material graph and no ray-traced reflections.
Cameras, lights, shadows: AEOne- and two-node, DOF; PremationOne- and two-node, DOF; Even
Skeleton rigging: AENone — requires DUIK; PremationFK, IK, FABRIK, weight painting; Premation; Auto-rig presets for biped and quadruped, per-chain IK/FK switching that preserves the pose, and per-vertex numeric weights.
Mesh deform: AEPuppet, two engines; PremationPuppet, ARAP solver; Even; One engine by choice. Bone and puppet rigs compose on the same layer.
Tracking & roto: AEPoint, camera, planar (mocha), Roto Brush 3; PremationPoint, planar, camera and face tracking, stabilization, Roto Brush; After Effects; All of it exists: one-click point tracking, planar and corner-pin tracking, a 3D Camera Tracker, face tracking, stabilization and a Roto Brush. By default the Roto Brush runs a segmentation model that ships with the app on every frame, with a soft, refined matte; a classic mode carries the outline by colour and motion instead. The camera solver is sparse. Expect all of it to be behind After Effects on difficult footage.

Text and audio

Text layout: AERight-to-left, vertical, optical kerning; PremationRight-to-left, vertical, optical kerning; Even; Since 0.8.3: bidirectional layout (Arabic and Hebrew mixed with Latin in one line), vertical writing with tate-chu-yoko and kinsoku line-breaking, and true optical kerning. Text is laid out by the native engine. Since 1.0 a bundled font set covers Latin, CJK, Devanagari, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew, a character the font lacks falls back to a system font, and a missing font is reported by name.
Audio: AEAudio panel, keyframed levels, audio effects; PremationAudio panel, keyframed level and pan, 26.3's audio effects; Even; Since 0.8.2: an Audio panel with a VU meter and level and pan faders on the selected layer, Fade In and Out, Noise Gate, Compressor, Distortion and De-esser, and audio-only preview.

Output

Preview and export: AESeparate render paths; PremationOne engine for viewport and export; Premation; The engine builds one frame description and the same renderer draws it for the viewport, Export, the Render Queue and the command line. The class of bug where the export looks different does not exist here.
Video formats: AEExtensive via Media Encoder; Premation18 export formats, including ProRes 4444 and HDR10 / HLG; Even; H.264, VP9 with alpha, 16-bit ProRes 4444 with alpha, HDR10 and HLG (10-bit HEVC, BT.2020), GIF, PNG, JPEG and EXR sequences, WAV, Lottie, EDL, OTIO, FCPXML, ALE, a Premation template package and the project file; plugins can add more. Since 1.0.1 every installer ships the ffmpeg the video formats are encoded with, and Fix video export reinstalls it in one click if it goes missing. The template package is not an Adobe .mogrt and does not open in Premiere Pro.
Lottie: AEExport via plugin; PremationImport and export, built in; Premation
Determinism: AENo published guarantee; PremationFrame index divided by fps; Premation; Two exports of one project produce identical frames, and a pixel-comparison harness gates every renderer change.

The product around it

AI: AEFirefly generative features; Premation73 tools against the document; Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Antigravity connect; Premation; The in-app assistant runs on your own provider key and calls the same operations the UI does, so its output is normal layers and keyframes; one prompt is one undo entry. Since 1.0, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT desktop and Codex, Cursor and Antigravity connect from Dashboard ▸ Connections through a local server on your computer, free on every plan. They edit the project you have open while you watch, you can stop them, each request is one undo step, and importing files or rendering waits for you to click Allow. ChatGPT on the web cannot reach a local server.
Plugins: AEC++ Effect and AEGP SDKs, CEP/UXP panels, scripting; PremationNative C++ SDK for effects, commands, panels, importers and export formats; a plugin store; After Effects; SDK 1.2 follows After Effects' effect API — selectors, parameter types, smart-render checkouts, 8, 16 and 32-bit float pixel worlds and a GPU path on the engine's own device — and goes past effects the way AEGP and AEIO do: menu commands that edit the project, panels that dock or pop out into their own window, importers, export formats, shipped presets and on-canvas handles. A plugin can read other times, the comp camera and lights, and the scene's depth. Plugin effects appear in the Effects browser, and Dashboard ▸ Plugins has a store that checks each package's signature and installs it without a restart. Third-party plugins are free; Premation's own, starting with a 3D model renderer in the Element 3D class, come with Premation Cloud. A crash disables that instance and the frame still renders; a plugin that is missing or locked passes the layer through and says why. Still behind After Effects: the store only opened in 1.0, After Effects plugins do not load, plugins cannot add layer types, and there is no scripting language like ExtendScript.
Renderer crash: AEProject lives in the application; Auto-Save files; PremationEngine in its own process; edits replayed; Even; If the engine stops, the editor keeps running, restarts it and replays your work, including edits that were in flight; if it keeps failing you are offered a recovery copy of the project. That arrived in 0.9.0 and has had far less use than After Effects' Auto-Save, so it is listed as level rather than a win.
Files: AEProprietary project file; PremationOpen directory bundle; Premation; Content-addressed assets, local version history, incremental saves that touch only what changed.
Opening After Effects projects: AENative .aep; Premation.aep and .aepx opened as a conversion, with a report; After Effects; Since 0.8.5: compositions, layers and parenting, transforms with their keyframes and easing, masks, text, and effects matched by name. Footage is relinked by filename and missing media is listed. Shape layers arrive as empty groups (their vector contents are not converted), an animated mask keeps its first shape, mixed text styling flattens to the first style, and expressions are carried as text and not run. The report says what did not come across.
Offline: AERequires sign-in; PremationLocal edition: no account, never contacts our servers; Premation; The local edition, built from the repository, has no account and its API layer refuses to send to our servers. It goes online only for things you start: the assistant with your own AI key, an ffmpeg repair download, or the face-tracking model download. The installers are the server edition, with a free sign-in and optional cloud.
Collaboration: AETeam Projects; PremationNone; After Effects; Removed deliberately rather than left unfinished. There is no multiplayer and none is planned.
Ecosystem: AEThirty years of it; PremationStarting; After Effects; Tutorials, templates, a hiring pool, and a plugin market. Premation's plugin store only opened in 1.0. This is the honest reason to stay on After Effects.
Price: AESubscription; PremationFree, AGPL-3.0; Premation

The two differences that are not a row in a table

Rigging

After Effects has no skeleton

This is not a feature After Effects does less well. It does not have one. Rigging a character there means buying DUIK and driving pins with nulls and expressions, because a pin is the only joint the application offers.

Premation has the rig model itself: bones with forward kinematics, IK chains solved with FABRIK, controllers that link to a bone and reach the solver directly, per-chain IK/FK switching that preserves the pose, and weights you can paint or type per vertex. Auto-rig presets build a biped or a quadruped in one operation.

A triangulated mesh with per-vertex weights painted as a heat map and a bone chain running through it

It writes keyframes, not video

Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Antigravity and it works through the same editing tools the interface uses. Ask it for a logo reveal and what lands on the timeline is layers, keyframes and easing you can drag, re-time and undo — not a clip you have to accept or throw away.

You watch each step and can stop it, and one request is one undo entry. Connections are free on every plan; the in-app assistant runs on your own provider key, with no credits.

You, in ClaudeIn Premation, make a 10-second logo reveal for NOVA with a glow.

Premation — HomeClaude

ClaudeClaude connected just now

Recent steps

Nothing yet. Send the prompt above and watch Claude work.

Should you switch?

For a lot of people the answer is no, and it is cheaper for everyone if that is obvious from this page rather than from a wasted afternoon.

Try it if

You animate UI, logos, titles, explainers or social cuts.
You want to rig flat characters without buying a second tool.
You want the AI to produce keyframes you can edit, not a video you cannot — in the app, or from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor.
You want your projects on your own disk, readable without an account.
The subscription is the reason you are reading this page.

Stay on After Effects if

Your work leans on rotoscoping, camera solving or planar tracking on difficult footage.
You depend on specific third-party effect packages or After Effects plugins, or on scripts.
You have a large back catalogue of After Effects projects built from shape layers, animated masks or expressions, which convert only in part.
You hand projects to other artists who only know After Effects.
You need several people in one project at once.

Nothing here needs an account, and the download is a normal installer from GitHub Releases. Your projects are .motion bundles on your own disk, so trying it costs an evening and leaves nothing behind if you go back.

See every feature