Premation vs Rive
Rive is an editor and runtime for interactive, real-time animation: state machines and inputs drive vector graphics inside apps, games and websites through Rive's own runtimes.
Across the 9 areas below, Rive is ahead on 1, the two are level on 4, and Premation is ahead on 4. The 1 are listed first: a comparison you can trust is one that says where it loses.
Pick Rive if
- You are shipping animation into an app or game and it must respond to user input at runtime — hover, drag, state changes. Rive's state machine and runtimes are built for exactly that, and Premation has no interactive runtime.
- Your deliverable is a .riv file a developer embeds, not a video.
- You want to work in the browser and collaborate on the same file live.
Pick Premation if
- Your deliverable is a video: an explainer, a title sequence, a social clip, a lower third. Premation is a compositor with a timeline, video layers, 183 effects and 18 export formats; Rive is not built for video.
- You need cameras, lights, 3D layers and depth of field, or an After Effects-style effect stack.
- You want an After Effects-shaped tool that runs offline, free, on your GPU, with a full graph editor and expressions.
Feature by feature
- Interactive runtime
- RiveState machines, inputs, runtimes for web, iOS, Android, Flutter, Unity and more
- PremationNone. Exports are video, image sequences, Lottie, SVG and editorial formats
- Rive
- This is the whole reason to pick Rive. Premation makes finished pictures, not interactive assets.
- Vector animation and rigging
- RiveBones, meshes, constraints, vector editing
- PremationBones, IK / FK chains, controllers, puppet mesh with painted weights, vector operators
- Even
- Video and compositing
- RiveNot a video compositor
- PremationVideo layers, blend modes, mattes, source monitor, edit tools, transitions, captions
- Premation
- Effects
- RiveA small set of vector effects and blend modes
- Premation183 effects across ten folders, 177 on the GPU
- Premation
- 3D
- Rive2D only (with layer-based depth tricks)
- PremationClassic 3D with cameras, lights, shadows, glTF meshes, depth of field
- Premation
- Graph editor
- RiveInterpolation curves per keyframe
- PremationOne graph editor for value and speed, modifier stacks, expressions
- Even
- Lottie
- RiveIts own .riv format; Lottie import exists
- PremationLottie in and out (vector shapes and transforms)
- Even
- Where it runs
- RiveBrowser and desktop apps, cloud-backed
- PremationDesktop on macOS and Windows, offline, files on your disk
- Even
- Different answers to different needs: collaboration in the cloud versus a local file you own.
- Price and licence
- RiveFree tier; paid plans per editor
- PremationFree, AGPL-3.0, no account; the optional cloud is the only paid part
- Premation
The Premation column is checked against the editor’s source at v0.7.0. The Rive column describes the product as its own site and documentation presented it on 2026-09-06; if something there has changed, tell us and this page changes.