Having had minimal experience with both Lottie and Rive on the implementation / embedding side, I can say that my experience with Rive was strictly better.
Does anyone know if there's something I was missing about Lottie if I needed to choose between them in the future?
I haven’t used Rive myself, but have been following its progress. Notably, the creator of Lottie joined the Rive team a couple of years ago. It’d be on my shortlist for tools to evaluate in this space.
I’ve personally pushed against the use of Lottie in projects I’ve worked on due to the file sizes being very difficult to justify for the kinds of animations that our designers wanted to use it for. SVGator was another alternative we had success with.
One thing I’ve been very frustrated is the amount of places I see Lottie pushed with no mention of file size. ie tools like Webflow, and general advocacy from prominent figures in the tech community. I’m sure there is a sweet spot for Lottie, but I’m also convinced that there are better choices for use cases most people are using it for.
I had never head of Rive before and it looks like something I can use in one of my projects. Thanks, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me addicted to HN.
I've used Rive in a small personal project before and I really can't imagine creating or editing web animations in any other way. Apparently they also made their own vector-based feathering technique, which is also amazing:
https://rive.app/blog/introducing-vector-feathering
I do understand the appeal for an open format though. Rive seems to have their own proprietary (documented) binary format: https://rive.app/docs/runtimes/advanced-topic/format
They say on https://rive.app/pricing that the Format is OS and MIT, perhaps I have missed something?
Oh, my mistake. I shouldn't have used the word "proprietary", but too late to edit. There does seem to be community-made runtimes: https://rive.app/docs/runtimes/community-runtimes
Me neither. Was pretty enthused, and even more so when I found that they have a desktop app instead of being yet another Web-only tool.
Then I downloaded the app and found you can't use it without setting up an "account" and being online.
So in the end, this is more tiresome Web-only crap. Deleted.