Lottie makes designs more interactive without the page-weight penalty that video brings. The problem is choosing from the many tools that now claim to work with the format.
Here are the ones genuinely worth a beginner’s time — two free, one paid.
Free Lottie Tools
Creattie
Creattie leads on the free side. Hundreds of Lottie icons and illustrations, a high quality bar, and — the differentiator — assets organised by industry rather than dumped in one pile.
Useful free pieces include mail notification, location pin, order tracking, and phone icons: the kind of small interface animation that’s tedious to build and easy to get wrong.
Customisation happens on the asset page. Trigger, size, colour, delay, and speed can all be adjusted before you download, which saves opening an animation tool at all for simple changes.
The free tier is genuinely usable. Paid membership unlocks thousands more industry-specific designs plus the integrated editor.
IconScout
IconScout is the better choice if you want one stock source covering more than Lottie. The design quality is high and consistent.
What makes it scale is the tooling around it: converter plugins, integrations with common CMS platforms, and an API. If you’re deploying Lottie across a large site rather than dropping in one hero animation, that infrastructure is the reason to pick it.
Most of the free Lottie animations are broadly applicable rather than niche, and the built-in editor lets you match assets to your project’s palette and timing before export.
Paid Lottie Tools
KeyShape
One paid tool makes the list. KeyShape is a Mac vector animation app — straightforward, quick to learn, and a one-time purchase (around $30 on the Mac App Store at the time of writing) rather than a subscription. There’s a 14-day trial, and the licence covers multiple machines.
Its most useful feature is the plugin-based import/export. You can pull a Lottie JSON down from LottieFiles, open it in KeyShape, edit it visually, and export it back — which means stock animations become starting points instead of take-it-or-leave-it assets.
Timing control is the other strength. Adjusting easing curves on a Lottie file is straightforward here in a way it isn’t in most alternatives.
The one limitation: you’re either starting from someone else’s file or building from scratch — there’s no template library to work from.
Conclusion
These three cover most of what a beginner needs. Creattie and IconScout give you high-quality assets without spending anything; KeyShape gives you the ability to make those assets your own.
Used well, Lottie produces interfaces that feel crafted and still load fast — which is exactly the combination that’s hard to achieve any other way.
We use these tools daily, and we build custom Lottie work when stock won’t carry a brand. Expert use of the format is what keeps load times low while the interface still feels crafted.
Need custom Lottie work rather than stock? Tell us what you’re building.