head to head · open source
anime vs lottie-ios
anime has 72,944 GitHub stars, 4,931 forks, 118 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. lottie-ios has 26,881 stars, 3,840 forks, 44 open issues and last shipped yesterday. anime leads on adoption by 171% (72,944 vs 26,881 stars). anime is written in JavaScript under MIT; lottie-ios is written in Swift under Apache-2.0. anime has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, lottie-ios 14%. lottie-ios was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (animation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| anime | lottie-ios | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 73K | ★ 27K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-08-21 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 3.8K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick anime if
- You weight community size — 73K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick lottie-ios if
- You want the lottie-ios feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and lottie-ios fits your workflow better
About anime
Anime.js is a free, MIT licensed JavaScript animation engine for developers who need to animate CSS properties, SVG, DOM attributes, and plain JavaScript objects from a single lightweight API.
read the full anime overview →
About lottie-ios
Lottie for iOS is an Apache 2.0 Swift library that natively renders After Effects and bodymovin JSON vector animations in realtime on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS, and it is aimed at Apple platform developers who want to ship designer authored motion without rebuilding it by hand in code.
read the full lottie-ios overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is anime or lottie-ios more popular?
anime has 72,944 GitHub stars and lottie-ios has 26,881. anime has the larger community by that measure.
Are anime and lottie-ios free?
Both are open source. anime is licensed under MIT and lottie-ios under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between anime and lottie-ios?
anime is written in JavaScript and lottie-ios in Swift. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, anime or lottie-ios?
Choose anime if you want the larger community (72,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lottie-ios if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.