DEV Community: Soroush

The Best Motion Design Plugins for Figma in 2026 (A Real Comparison)

Soroush — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:48:28 +0000

Figma wasn’t supposed to be a motion tool.

And yet… here we are.

In 2026 you can animate logos, UI, gradients, even effects — without ever leaving Figma. No After Effects. No exporting back and forth. Just design → animate → export.

But — and this matters — not all motion plugins inside Figma are equal. Some feel like helpers. One of them feels like a studio.

I tested the main ones seriously. Not just 2 minute clicking around. Actual logo animation, easing tweaks, gradient experiments, export stress tests.

Here’s the honest breakdown.

1. MotionKit — This One Feels Different

👉 https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1602896408819057835/motionkit-free-animation-motion-design-inside-figma

MotionKit lets you animate:

Fills
Gradients
Strokes
Effects
Vector morphs
Frame-by-frame sequences ( Even it has Onion Skinning )
Nested Animations ( Nested Frames )

And that changes everything.

The custom bezier editor? You can set your own curve as default. That means you’re not just animating — you’re defining your own motion language.

It has:

A real timeline
Nested animation systems ( This is game changing )
MP4, GIF, PNG sequence, Lottie export
No locked features

It doesn’t feel like “UI animation”.

It feels like someone said:
“What if Figma had an animation engine?”

Best for:

Logo motion
Social media branding
Motion identity systems
Product Demos, Micro interactions

MotionKit is my personal pick, not only because it's great in terms of features, but also because it's genuinely 100% free, new & trending. Deserves a chance.

2. Motion – Animate Your Designs

👉 https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/889777319208467032/motion-animate-your-designs

This one is popular. And for good reason.

Clean timeline. Easy to understand. Good for UI interactions.

If you're animating:

App transitions
Micro-interactions
Landing page previews

It works.

But once you try animating gradients or effects deeply… you start to feel the limit.

It’s solid. Just not “motion graphics” level.

3. Figmotion

👉 https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/733025261168520714/figmotion

Old school. Reliable. Free.

It does keyframes. It works.

But the interface feels dated, and the property support isn’t deep. You won’t be doing expressive brand animation here.

Good for beginners though. No hate.

4. Jitter

(Search “Jitter” in Figma Community)

Jitter is fast. That’s its strength.

You can make something move quickly, export, done.

But it feels more like a lightweight content animator than a motion system. Less granular control. Less experimental space.

If speed > depth, it’s fine.

If control > speed… maybe not.

5. LottieFiles for Figma

👉 https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/809860933081065308/lottiefiles-discover-create-export-lottie-animations

This one is different.

It’s not really trying to be a full animation engine. It’s focused on Lottie workflows.

If your goal is:

Web integration
App animation export
Lottie JSON pipeline

Then it makes sense.

But for designing motion from scratch? Not really its purpose.

Quick Comparison (Real Talk Table)

Plugin	Depth	Gradients	Effects	Frame-by-Frame	Export Freedom	Feels Like
MotionKit	High	Yes	Yes	Yes	High	Mini animation studio
Motion	Medium	Limited	Limited	No	Good	UI animation tool
Figmotion	Basic	No	Minimal	No	Basic	Starter tool
Jitter	Light	Limited	Limited	No	Good	Fast content maker
LottieFiles	Focused	—	—	—	Lottie	Export utility

So Which One Should You Actually Use?

I always had to switch from Figma to AE, but since I discovered this new free tool "MotionKit"; it changed my workflow forever.

And I don’t say that lightly. I tried the others.
Some tools let you animate.
Some tools let you create motion.
But the tool that gives you all, and allows you to export FREEly in any quality, without freaking watermarks,
That's MotionKit in my experience.

Feel free to share your experience down here in the comments

FREE Wordpress Custom Fields Plugin for 2026 ( ACF Alternative )

Soroush — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:28:15 +0000

I switched from ACF to OpenFields and didn’t expect to

I found an open source WordPress plugin called OpenFields by accident while testing stuff. Ended up using it in a real project. It worked so well I just wanted to write this quick post so more people know it exists.

Not sponsored. Just a dev saying thanks to another dev.

OpenFields is basically a free modern alternative to ACF Pro. Same idea: custom fields, field groups, repeaters, conditions. But no paywalls and the UI feels actually modern.

What makes it good

It’s not trying to reinvent WordPress. It just does the ACF workflow properly:

all common field types
repeaters + nested groups
conditional logic
show rules (post type, taxonomy, user meta, comment meta)
REST API ready
fully free + open source

The admin panel is React + Shadcn and honestly feels faster than most WP plugins I use. No clunky screens, no weird UX fights.

The API is ACF-style (which is a good thing)

If you’ve used ACF before, you already know how to use this.

$price = get_field('price', get_the_ID());

$product = get_field('product_details', get_the_ID(), false);

if (have_rows('team_members')) {
    while (have_rows('team_members')) {
        the_row();
        echo get_sub_field('name');
    }
}

No new mental model. No fancy abstraction. Just clean PHP.

That alone makes migration way less scary.

Quick links

If you wanna try it:

GitHub repo: novincode/openfields
Docs / website: openfields.codeideal.com If it helps your workflow, consider starring the repo or talking about it. Open source projects live or die by visibility more than money tbh.

Curious what other WordPress devs think. Especially people deep in ACF land.

Now I create my animations inside Figma for FREE instead of After Effects

Soroush — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:52:37 +0000

Let me tell you exactly how I ended up writing this.

I was working on a product demo — nothing crazy, just a few screens animating in, some micro-interactions, maybe a Lottie at the end for the developer. Standard stuff. I opened After Effects, waited for it to load, remembered I had to update it, then remembered it costs me $XX every month, and just... sat there for a second.

I thought: there has to be a better way to do this in 2026.

There is. I'm going to tell you about it. But first, some context.

The After Effects problem nobody says out loud

AE is genuinely powerful. I'm not here to trash it. For VFX, compositing, broadcast — it's irreplaceable.

But for the kind of motion design most of us actually do day-to-day?

UI animation for handoff
Product demos and explainers
Social media loops
Lottie exports for dev teams

For that work, After Effects is:

Too expensive (the CC subscription alone is painful if you're freelancing or indie)
A completely separate app from where your actual design lives
Built on a workflow that hasn't fundamentally changed in 20 years

You export from Figma, import into AE, animate, render, fix the render, rename the file, send it. That pipeline exists because for years, there was no alternative.

In 2026, there is.

Animation inside Figma — where things actually stand

Figma's plugin ecosystem has matured a lot. Before I get to the one I actually use now, here's an honest look at what else is out there:

Figmotion — open source, been around forever, does keyframe animation right inside Figma. The UI feels dated and it can be confusing to set up, but it works. Good starting point if you want something minimal.
Figma Community →

Jitter — probably the most polished animation plugin visually. The interface is slick. But it's a separate web app (you leave Figma to use it), and the free tier hits a wall fast. Once you go past basic stuff you're looking at a subscription.
Figma Community →

LottieFiles — great if your only goal is Lottie export. Narrow focus, does it well, not really built for complex animation workflows.
Figma Community →

Aninix — serious tool, exports to Lottie/MP4/GIF, good feature set. It's paid, which is fine, but that's the tradeoff.
Figma Community →

These are all legitimate options depending on what you need. But they all have limits — either in features, cost, or the fact that they pull you out of Figma into something else.

MotionKit

This is the one I didn't see coming.

MotionKit is a Figma plugin that is completely free. No subscription. No "basic/pro" tier nonsense. No export watermark. You install it, you animate, you export.

Install from Figma Community →

When I first read the feature list I honestly thought it was exaggerated. It wasn't.

What it actually does

Real timeline animation

There's a proper keyframe timeline. Not a toy version — I mean visual easing curves, snapping, a work area marker, draggable keyframes. It animates over 17 properties: position, scale, rotation, opacity, blur, shadows, corner radius, fill color, stroke... basically everything you'd expect in a proper motion tool.

The thing that changed how I work is recording mode.

You enable it, move the playhead to where you want, then just move things around in Figma normally. Keyframes appear automatically. Resize a layer, change a color, morph a vector shape — all captured. No menus, no clicking tiny diamonds on a timeline.

It sounds small. It isn't. It removes the part of animation software that always felt like fighting the tool.

Frame-by-frame mode

I didn't expect this to be any good. It's genuinely good.

MotionKit has a full cel-animation workflow: explicit frames, onion skinning (see previous frames as ghosts while you draw), independent frame rates per clip, per-frame timing control. It feels like Procreate's approach dropped into Figma.

The detail I appreciate most: detached layers. You can mark a layer as persistent — it stays visible across all frames without being redrawn. Your background. Your UI chrome. The stuff that never changes. You just detach it and forget about it.

Nested animations

This is where it gets weird in a good way.

You can put a timeline animation inside a frame-by-frame clip. Or a frame-by-frame inside a timeline. Or nest several levels deep. Each one runs at its own frame rate. The engine composites it correctly.

If you've ever tried to do something like this in other tools — combining a hand-drawn loop with a smooth keyframed element — you know how painful it gets. Here it just... works.

Modifiers (v2+)

This was added more recently and it's the Blender-brained part of the plugin.

Instead of cluttering your timeline with extra keyframes, you attach modifiers to a layer:

Follow Path — object follows a vector path you draw
Stroke Trim — animate stroke offset for loading spinners, progress bars
Loop Mode — set this layer to loop, play once, or ping-pong, independently of everything else
Copy Animation — reference another layer's keyframes on this one

They stack. They run in order. You get procedural-feeling animation without the complexity usually required to pull it off.

Export

MP4 (H.264), GIF, PNG sequence, Lottie JSON — all built in. No external encoder. 1x to 4x scale. You animate, you render, you're done.

Lottie export in particular is something I used to need a whole separate workflow for. Now it's just an option in the export menu.

Who should care about this

If you're a motion designer doing VFX or compositing work: probably not the thing for you. AE is still the right call there.

If you're a UI designer, product designer, freelancer, indie dev — someone who animates stuff regularly but doesn't want to live in a dedicated motion suite — this is worth your time.

In 2026, the idea that you need a full desktop subscription to animate a product demo, or to hand off a Lottie to a developer, or to build a social asset — that idea is just... outdated. MotionKit is the reason.

Try it

Search MotionKit in Figma Community plugins, or go to motionkit.codeideal.com.

It's free. Install takes 10 seconds. If you hate it, you uninstall it. But I'd guess you won't.

If it ends up being useful, the developer has a GitHub Sponsors and Buy Me a Coffee. Solo project, no funding. That kind of support is what keeps tools like this alive and free.

Figma Community → search MotionKit | GitHub → novincode/motionkit

The Open Source Alternative to IDM ( Mac / Linux / Windows )

Soroush — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:04:10 +0000

The Famous IDM on windows has so many great features that makes life much easier. Such as Downloading in Segments, Queues, Schedules, Browser Extension and ...
But it's not free, and only available on windows.
and since I'm a mac user, I was looking for an alternative to IDM That works on EVERY OS!

As we search, the Free Download Managers we'll find today ( 2026 ) is:

FDM Website
Neat Download Manager Website
Motrix Website
DLMan ( Trending ) Download From Github

The main question is:

Which of these free apps work best?

my answer? DLMan. Why?

Downloading in Multi Segments
Scheduling and Queues
Modern Architecture ( with Rust + React )
Browser Extensions
Cross Platform ( Mac / Windows / Linux )
FREE & Open Source ( Huge deal for me )

Feel free to try all of them and see what works best for you.

Best Download Managers in 2026 (macOS, Windows, Linux)

Soroush — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:08:01 +0000

If you download large files, browsers still suck.
These are the tools people actually end up using.

1. FDM (Free Download Manager)

Free
Cross-platform
Multi-connections

Reality:

Not native. Feels old. Resume is unreliable on long downloads.

2. Folx (macOS, Paid), IDM ( Windows Only ), ...

there are a lot of famous but paid download managers which I won't get into, because I'm writing this article to suggest free alternatives
Paid. Closed source. Not Cross Platform.

3. Neat Download Manager

Free
Lightweight

Reality:

Limited control. Resume breaks sometimes. Not maintained much. No Queues

4. Motrix

Free
Open source
Cross-platform

Reality:

Heavy ( Electron Core ~ 100MB! ), limited, no queues

See on Github

5. DLMan

* Free

Open source
macOS / Windows / Linux
Built with Rust + Tauri

Download From Github

Reality:

Newly launched, Queues & Schedules, Light Weight (~5Mb)

My Pick?

Since I love trying new softwares, I started using DLMan, works well for me and provides a lot of features and works good in any OS. I may find another Download Manager some day and add to this article.

Let me know in the comments what's your pick and why :)