Why I Switched from Framer Motion to GSAP

🚀 Why I Switched from Framer Motion to GSAP
A real-world breakdown from a frontend dev who builds with motion-first UX

🧠 Context
When I started out with frontend animation in React, Framer Motion felt like magic.
Simple initial / animate / exit props made it super fast to animate modals, buttons, lists — anything UI-based.

But once I began working on more motion-driven projects like:

🧬 DOM + Canvas hybrid UI

🎯 Interactive landing pages

🪐 Scroll-based 3D storytelling (with Three.js)

…I started hitting walls. Syncing animations. Handling scroll. Cross-platform support. That's when I discovered GSAP.

✅ What GSAP Does Better (And Why I Use It Now)

🎬 Real Timeline Control With gsap.timeline(), you get frame-accurate sequencing. Overlaps, delays, sync — all with fine-tuned control.

Framer has no true timeline system. Syncing multiple variants across components gets messy fast.

🧩 Animate Anything CSS, SVG, canvas, scrollTop, clip-path, even JS objects — GSAP handles it.

Framer is limited to props like x, opacity, scale, etc.

🌍 Platform-Agnostic GSAP works with DOM, SVG, WebGL, Three.js, and plain JS.

Framer Motion = React only.

📐 Unit Flexibility px, %, vw, em, --css-vars — GSAP understands them all, no need for manual conversion.

Framer often requires workarounds or state calculations for dynamic units.

🌀 ScrollTrigger (Built-In) Scrub animations

Pin sections

Media-query-based motion

Timeline-on-scroll

Framer needs third-party observers and tons of glue code.

🚀 Performance GSAP is written in vanilla JS and optimized with direct requestAnimationFrame. No re-rendering issues.

Framer can drop frames when animating multiple elements due to React lifecycle overhead.
💡 Final Thoughts
Framer Motion is great for building UI animation.
But GSAP is a tool for building motion-powered UX — the kind where animation isn't just an effect, it's part of the experience.

Framer = Animator
GSAP = Motion Director 🎬

🙌 Over to you:
Have you tried both? What’s your go-to setup for motion-heavy projects?

Let’s share knowledge — comment below!