AtomCut is a free motion design and video editor that runs in the browser: a Figma-style infinite canvas with a real multi-track timeline underneath it, in one window, with no account and no install. It ships with 337,000 open-source icons, 4,555 public-domain sound effects, 103 kinetic text looks, 36 keyframeable effects, 23 transitions, vector morphing, captions, motion tracking and a frame-by-frame mode, and it exports MP4, WebM, GIF, PNG sequences, SVG and Lottie. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux as a desktop app, on an iPad with touch, and offline once it has loaded.
I built it, alone, so discount everything below by however much you like. Then open app.atomcut.net. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for, which means every sentence in this post can be checked in about ten minutes. That is the only reason I feel fine writing a post that is, unavoidably, a list of things my own app does.
What "a whole studio in a tab" means
Most browser tools for motion pick a side. Canvas tools (Jitter, Fable, Figma's prototype animations) have a good stage and a thin timeline. Video tools (CapCut, Clipchamp, Canva's video mode) have a timeline and no real vectors, no pen, no keyframes on arbitrary properties. AtomCut's one structural bet is that the two halves belong in one window: the canvas above, an NLE below, and one document underneath both, so a group is a clip, a text layer is a caption, an icon is a set of paths, and all of them keyframe the same way.
One window. Canvas, inspector, plugins rail, and the timeline with a group opened to show the four paths a Lucide rocket is made of.
The rest of this post is the contents. I have kept a "what it does not do" line in most sections, because a list with no gaps is an advert, and because those lines are where you decide whether it fits your work.
Vector tools that are actually vector tools
A Bézier pen with per-node corner rounding. Parametric shape tools. Segment-level path editing. Boolean composite groups (union, subtract, intersect) that carry their own fill, stroke and effects and that you can still get back out of. Strokes are a pipeline, so one path can have trim, dash, wave, taper and markers stacked on it. Masks, track mattes and feathering. Auto layout that reads the row, column or grid you already arranged and makes it the rule (⇧A).
Shape morphing is keyframed path geometry: set the points at one time, set them differently at another, and the app interpolates point by point. Draw on a raster layer with 43 pressure-sensitive brushes, including a simulated watercolour with wet bleed, granulation and drying, then split the drawing on its ink into separate layers.
What it does not do: it is not Illustrator. No mesh gradients, no CMYK, no print workflow.
337,000 icons that animate themselves
Every open-source icon set (208 sets: Lucide, Tabler, Phosphor, Material Symbols, Simple Icons, the emoji and flag sets) is searchable inside the editor, licence-gated so nothing non-commercial or share-alike can end up in your export. An icon is not a special object; it goes in through the SVG importer and lands as path layers in a group, so it morphs, takes effects, keyframes and exports like anything you drew.
Draw On is the part people stop on. It is a layer animation that inks the outline instead of moving the layer: together, one by one along the length, or staggered; from either end or the middle; fills kept, faded along or faded late. Drop a Lucide rocket, and it draws itself on over 900 ms, in the order it was drawn. Change the icon, the timing stays. Change the timing, the icon stays.
Frame 12 of a 900 ms Draw On. It is one tile in the same Animate tab every layer has.
What it does not do: search matches icon names, not synonyms. "home" misses the sets that call it "house". I wrote up how the icon panel is built if you want the engineering.
Text animation is the big one
Text was the first thing AtomCut did and it is still the deepest. Per-character styling. 103 text looks in the library (Karaoke, Neon, Synthwave, VHS, Typed, Terminal, Hologram, Lower Third, Title Card, Credits, Ticker, Datamosh…), each previewed as the real animation, each recoloured by one colour dial. 43 layer animations for entrances and exits. Per-glyph shadow, glow, extrude and echo as effect cards you can stack, sort and keyframe. Text converts to editable vector outlines. Right-to-left and bidirectional text with Arabic shaping, because I type Persian.
Text on a path: the text tool grows a wave cursor over any shape's edge; click, and the text binds to that outline. It never snapshots, so a morph or a keyframed corner radius re-lays the words on the live curve. Slide it along in laps, flip it, detach it.
Captions: a caption is a text layer with timed words. Type the words, press Tap sync and tap along as the clip plays, and the spoken word lights up at the playhead, styled however you like (Karaoke lights it as a white segment of the band; Punch switches it to the look's second colour; Whisper weights it). Retyping a word never shifts the others' timing.
Sound per letter: a typing sound lands on each glyph as it appears, with its hit point on the transient, so kinetic type clicks in time rather than roughly near it.
The Focus scope: what the spoken word looks like, separate from the rest of the caption.
What it does not do: it does not transcribe. You type the words and tap the timing. If you need a first pass from speech, get it elsewhere and bring the words.
4,555 sound effects, and a sound stack
An archive of public-domain sounds (Kenney, OpenGameArt's CC0 subset, a synthesized set of ours; 37 publishers, 91 packs), searchable from inside the editor. Every row draws its real waveform before you download a byte. ↓ walks the shelf and plays as it goes; ↵ drops the sound at the playhead with its transient on the playhead, not its first sample. An ear guard measures each sound's perceived loudness, not its peak, and holds anything above a ceiling down to it, so a brickwalled impact cannot ambush you between two soft ticks.
Audio clips carry an effect stack of their own: parametric EQ, reverb, echo, compressor and drive, plus keyframed gain, fades, pitch and keep-pitch. Cut transitions crossfade audio. A Waveform Visualizer plugin draws a procedural waveform or spectrum that reacts to any clip's sound, live; a LipSync Studio plugin maps mouth shapes to a voice clip and generates the switches as an ordinary nested clip.
Three sounds placed with Enter. Ordinary audio clips, tagged SFX, each with fades, an effect stack and keyframable gain.
What it does not do: dragging a sound onto a lane places the file as it is and ignores the landing settings; use ↵ or Add for those. The loudness story is its own post.
36 effects, 23 transitions, and everything keyframes
The effect stack is one list, on any layer, and every field on every card keyframes. Shadow, glow, blur, motion blur, RGB split. Light rays, lens flares, a travelling shine, live lightning. Bulge, wave, twirl, lens distortion, roughen edges, glitch. Halftone, pixelate, bevel, posterize, gradient map. A liquid glass that refracts the real backdrop behind it. Film grain, damage, scanlines, vignette, sharpen. Lift/gamma/gain colour wheels. Chroma key and one-click background removal. The same stack applies to the whole frame as a final pass, or through an adjustment layer with a scoped reach.
Transitions: Cross, Soft, Additive and Blur Dissolve, Dip to Colour, Push, Slide Over, Slide Apart, Roll, Iris, Clock Wipe, Barn Door, Bloom, Flash, Glitch, Shake, Smear, Pop, Displace, and a few more, each with its own knobs.
Motion tracking follows position, scale and rotation in a video and drives any layer, effect region or matte with it.
What it does not do: there is no GPU-heavy 3D. No cameras, no lights, no extruded 3D text with materials. The extrude on text is stepped 2D copies behind each letter, and its blurb says so.
Animation: keyframe anything, including on/off
Any property keyframes, including whether an effect is enabled. Record mode keys every edit you make while it is on. A curve editor and a dope sheet, easing presets and custom cubic-béziers, motion paths with spatial tangents. Speed is a keyframed property too: ramp into slow motion, hold a frame, drift back. Node graphs and expression drivers, modulators, typed variables that layers reference across the document, so one colour variable retints a whole brand's worth of icons.
A flipbook mode does frame-by-frame with onion skinning, and each nested composition keeps its own frame rate, which nests correctly because a frame rate is a grid, not a clock.
Export: MP4, WebM, GIF, PNG, SVG, Lottie
MP4, WebM and GIF. PNG sequences. Transparent and per-layer exports. Audio-only bounce. SVG, where a text on a path carries real glyph outlines already placed on the curve. Lottie, with a fidelity report that tells you what the translator could and could not carry, because Lottie cannot read a live relation and so every derived frame is baked to ordinary keys first, Draw On included.
The export dialog on a 1080p composition, sized to 720p. Free is everything up to 720p; Lifetime is the ceiling removed.
What it does not do: there is no MOV or ProRes, and no 4K in the free tier. Free exports are capped at 720p with no watermark; AtomCut Lifetime is $29 once (the launch price; $49 later) for Full HD, 4K and beyond, transparent and per-layer export, on web and desktop, every future version included. There is no subscription and there will not be one.
Mac, Windows, Linux, iPad, offline
It is a web app first: app.atomcut.net is the whole thing, and it installs as a PWA and keeps working offline, saving projects locally. There are desktop builds for macOS, Windows and Linux for people who want a dock icon and file associations. On an iPad it is the same workspace with touch: long-press menus, two-finger gestures, pressure on the brushes with a pencil. One workspace at every screen size, not a mobile subset.
Shortcuts match the physical key, so ⌘Z works under a Persian, Arabic, Cyrillic or Greek layout, and there are keymap presets for Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and Blender if your hands already know one of those.
What it is bad at
It is two months old, and one person maintains it, so there are rough edges, and there is no community yet to have found them for you. It is for motion graphics, short video, UI animation, launch clips and captions; it is not for cutting a two-hour feature, where a native NLE will handle a 4K multicam timeline better than a browser tab will. There is no live collaboration; a document is typed and versioned (schema v72, every migration still running), which is the groundwork for it, but today it is one person per file. No speech-to-text. No 3D.
Reported bugs are usually fixed in the next release, and the changelog is public, so you can read exactly what changed and when.
Why is it free?
Because I think the studio should be the free part. Every tool, effect and panel, every icon and sound, no watermark, no account: that is what makes it possible to open a link and check this post instead of taking my word. The thing you pay for once is the resolution ceiling coming off, at the moment you have something you want in HD. That is the whole business model, and it means the free app has to be genuinely good, or nobody ever reaches that moment.
FAQ
Is AtomCut really free? Yes. The whole studio, with no watermark, exporting up to 720p. Lifetime ($29 once at launch) removes the resolution limit and adds transparent and per-layer export.
Can I use the icons and sounds commercially? Yes. Icon sets are gated to licences that permit commercial use in rendered artwork (CC BY sets show who to credit). Every sound is CC0.
Does it work on Linux and iPad? The web app runs anywhere a modern browser does, including iPad with touch. Desktop builds exist for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Can I export to After Effects or Figma? No. Export is MP4, WebM, GIF, PNG sequence, SVG and Lottie. Lottie is the interchange format for developers; SVG for designers.
Is it open source? The source is public under a Fair Source licence (FSL-1.1-MIT): you can read it, run it and modify it, and it converts to MIT after two years.
Open app.atomcut.net, press T, type something, and press Space.
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