head to head · open source
anime vs swup
anime has 73,360 GitHub stars, 4,957 forks, 118 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. swup has 5,233 stars, 201 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. anime leads on adoption by 1,302% (73,360 vs 5,233 stars). anime is written in JavaScript under MIT; swup is written in TypeScript under MIT. anime has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, swup 4%. swup was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (animation, javascript), 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 | swup | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 73K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-08-21 | 2026-09-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 201 |
| 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 swup if
- You want the swup feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and swup 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 swup
Swup is an open source TypeScript page transition library for developers who want animated, single page app style navigation on server rendered websites without adopting a client side framework.
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Frequently asked questions
Is anime or swup more popular?
anime has 73,360 GitHub stars and swup has 5,233. anime has the larger community by that measure.
Are anime and swup free?
Both are open source. anime is licensed under MIT and swup under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between anime and swup?
anime is written in JavaScript and swup in TypeScript. 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 swup?
Choose anime if you want the larger community (73,360 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose swup if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.