Best Animation Software for Mac
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What is Animation Software for Mac?
Animation software enables artists, designers, and studios to create animated content by manipulating images, characters, and objects over time. It provides tools for keyframing, motion paths, rigging, and frame-by-frame editing to bring static visuals to life. The software often supports both 2D and 3D animation workflows, including modeling, shading, lighting, and rendering capabilities. Many solutions integrate with audio editing, video compositing, and visual effects tools to produce polished, professional-quality animations. By combining creative control with powerful rendering technology, animation software helps storytellers and creators produce engaging visual experiences for film, games, and digital media. Compare and read user reviews of the best Animation software for Mac currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Unity
Unity Technologies
The leading platform for creating interactive, real-time content. Build 2D, 3D and VR games and apps at speed. From artist tools to live-ops, everything you need to bring your vision to life today. The complete solutions for professionals to create and operate. Create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries. Change up your splash screen. Or completely remove it. Gain greater insight into what’s happening in your game with real-time data on crashes, exceptions and user feedback. Minimize downtime with access to expert technical support when you encounter issues. Available as a separate purchase through a Unity sales representative. Unity Gaming Services: backend and LiveOps services trusted by world-class studios to support multiplayer and live games at any scale, with any engine or tech stack.Starting Price: $35.00/month -
2
Adobe After Effects
Adobe
Create cinematic movie titles, intros, and transitions. Remove an object from a clip. Start a fire or make it rain. Animate a logo or character. With After Effects, the industry-standard motion graphics and visual effects software, you can take any idea and make it move. Animate titles, credits, and lower thirds. Start from scratch or with presets available right from the app. From spin to swipe to slide — your text is on the move. Combine videos and images to create anything you can imagine. Choose exciting effects from hundreds of options, remove unwanted objects or people, and create VR videos to drop your audience right into the action. Set anything in motion with keyframes or expressions. Or use presets to kick-off your designs for unique results. Create compositions in Premiere Pro. Use Dynamic Link to eliminate intermediate rendering between applications. Import from Photoshop, Illustrator, Character Animator, Adobe XD, and Animate.Starting Price: $54.99 per month -
3
Adobe Animate
Adobe
Design interactive animations for games, TV shows, and the web. Bring cartoons and banner ads to life. Create animated doodles and avatars. And add action to eLearning content and infographics. With Animate, you can quickly publish to multiple platforms in just about any format, and reach viewers on any screen. Create interactive web and mobile content for games and ads using powerful illustrations and animation tools. Build game environments, design start screens, and integrate audio. Share your animations as augmented reality experiences. With Animate, you can do all your asset design and coding right inside the app. Sketch and draw more expressive characters with Adobe Fresco Live Brushes that blend and bloom just like the real thing. Make your characters blink, talk, and walk with simple frame-by-frame animation. And create interactive web banners that respond to user interactions such as mouse movement, touch, and clicks.Starting Price: $20.99 per month -
4
Moovly
Moovly
Moovly is an online platform to easily create animated videos, video presentations and other multimedia content without being an expert. Create your own company videos, product explainers, animated tutorials, content marketing videos and more with a simple, library-based drag and drop interface. Combine Moovly library objects with your own uploaded media (pictures, sounds, videos). Animate and time all objects with a user-friendly timeline. Export your content in any video format for projection, television, smartphone or tablet.Starting Price: $25.00/month/user -
5
Blender
Blender Foundation
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now. -
6
Maya
Autodesk
Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls. -
7
Pencil2D
Pencil2D
Lightweight and easy to use so you can focus on animating and not what button to hit next. Seamlessly switch between raster and vector workflows, allowing you to sketch, ink & paint on the go. Pencil2D is completely open source and free to use, even commercially! We’re happy to share with all of you Pencil2D’s most recent release. This time our top priority was fixing the most immediate and pressing issues that not only broke the animation experience but also to patch previously implemented features. Over 330+ individual commits has been added since the last release, to stabilize and improve the software for continued use.Starting Price: Free -
8
Animation Paper
Animation Paper
Pro animators, students, filmmakers, and game developers will love the ease and speed of working in Animation Paper for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Quickly test ideas, or train your skills. Work rough, then clean up. This awesome app will feel effortless, while super efficient and powerful, and so much fun! A most important part of your animation production pipeline. Super responsive interface, prompt, and real-time workflow. Quickly gets you in the zone. Non-intrusive and cleverly built. The way 'traditional' animation is supposed to be done today. Uncluttered, intuitive, and what the pro needs. Super fast responsiveness, while drawing, while flipping, while everything. High-quality lines, no degradation when transformed or resolution is changed. Small to large format frames. Real-time smooth rotation and zooming of the view. Light table (onion skinning, advanced and customizable) Easy, yet powerful timing and reuse (also scribbled notes and sound wave display).Starting Price: $79 one-time payment -
9
Synfig Studio
Synfig
Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as a powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create frame-by-frame animation, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources. Transform any vector shape into another! Synfig gives you powerful tools for full control of your vector artwork. Just set the key positions and the intermediate frames will be calculated automatically. Synfig provides more than 50 layers to create illustrations and animations of any complexity. Choose from several types of layers: geometry, gradients, filters, distortions, transformations, fractals and others. The full-featured bone system allows you to create cutout animations using bitmap images or control your vector artwork.Starting Price: Free -
10
Moho
Lost Marble
Moho Pro 13.5 is changing the animation software game. We’ve combined the most powerful animation technology with state-of-the-art professional animation tools, so your best animation projects come to life faster and easier. Formerly Anime Studio, Moho Pro 13.5 is everything you need to expand your animation toolkit with more efficient animation tools that improve projects and workflows over traditional, time-consuming, and often tedious software. New and enhanced Pro-only features that you won’t find anywhere else on the market. Use Moho Pro’s brand-new bitmap and freehand drawing capabilities, powerful vector animation tools, our revolutionary bone-rigging system, improved 3D object support, and more for a simplified and more efficient workflow. This is the all-in-one animation tool for professionals and digital artists. Moho animation software has been used around the world to create amazing animations in professional studios, agencies, and OSCAR® nominated films.Starting Price: $399.99 one-time fee -
11
Doodly
Etison
Doodly is the first and only doodle video creation software to allow anyone, regardless of technical or design skills to create professional, realistic doodle videos in minutes. No longer will you be forced to pay outrageous fees, and wait weeks to months for professional designers and videographers to create hand-sketched, doodle videos for you. You’ll be able to create your own professional doodle sketch videos with little, to no design or technical skills. And not only that, but you’ll be able to create your videos in minutes… not weeks. And the end-result can be even better than what the professionals deliver! Can be used for sales and/or social media videos, special occasions, or just for the fun of drawing. The only limit is your imagination! Create unlimited whiteboard, blackboard, greenboard, and even glassboard doodle videos. Just select a doodle image. Click and drag it to the canvas, and Doodly will automatically draw the image for you.Starting Price: $39 per month -
12
VidToon
Atlas Web Solutions
Vidtoon 2.0 is a completely drag and drop desktop-based 2D animation software. This tool can be used on both PC (Windows) and Mac. We’ve Outdone Ourselves. The All New Editor Works Faster Than Ever Before. We Help You Create 2D Animated Explainer Videos in Record Time. More Ready-To-Go Animated Characters Included For Just About Any Scenario And Niche That You Want To Dominate. Create videos for your social media platforms by choosing any resolution that best correspond your platform. Give Your Animated Explainer Video A Touch of Reality With Our Microsoft and Google Dynamic Text To Speech Options! Now Create Animated Explainer Videos That Are Up To 25 Min Long As Compared To Just 3 Min Earlier. Sell A Longer Explainer Video For More Profits.Starting Price: $49/Month -
13
Animation:Master
Hash
Whether you’re looking to create whole three dimensional worlds or have a two dimensional project in mind, Hash Animation:Master is the 3D software you need to design and render amazing imagery and animation from the comfort of your kitchen table! It has been proven to be one of the most easy to use, affordable and powerful 3D programs available. A:M is as advanced as it is easy to learn. Our provided text and video tutorials will guide you through the steps to not only become an A:M professional, but to jump-start your career in the 3D industry as an animator. A:M experts from around the world are always available to help beginners with tutorials and answers on the A:M Forums. Our community is one of the most helpful, knowledgeable and responsive anywhere. And if our users can’t help you, we surely can! -
14
Easy Sketch Pro
Easy Sketch Pro
Upload any video and the software will sketch out the opening scene then make the mind blowing effect from Sketch to Live Video. User can set the drawing time of the sketch before it transitions to LIVE video. Add your own music or voice over to both sketch and/or live video. Add Your Own Text With Drag 'N' Drop Interface. Add Your Own background music, voice over or select from our vast library of ready made tracks. Add your own images or use our huge resource of royalty free images. Everything is totally 100% customizable. Extremely Powerful - Imagine selling this to local businesses like fitness clients and restaurants. You include a live video of their service like cooking or a gym routine while the sketch does the rest. Create the EXACT style of video you want... Do you prefer a chalk effect, brush, hard pen, crayon, e.g. for kids teaching?Starting Price: $37 -
15
Raw Shorts
Raw Shorts
Our text to animated video technology uses AI to create a video draft within seconds, saving you countless hours of video creation. First upload your video script and our machine learning algorithms will scan the text to identify the main concepts for your storyboard. Our AI goes to work and finds media assets to match your script, places them on the timeline and generates voice narration. All you need to do is review the instant draft, or use our drag-and-drop editor to make adjustments if necessary and publish! Our drag and drop animated video maker makes it easy for you to customize your AI generated video rough cut in minutes. If you can build a Powerpoint slide you can make an awesome video with Raw Shorts. The platform can be accessed from any browser and has some powerful features like text-to-speech, and animated charts over 1 million media assets.Starting Price: $49.00/month -
16
OpenToonz
DWANGO
Based on the software "Toonz", developed by Digital Video S.p.A. in Italy, OpenToonz has been customized by Studio Ghibli, and used for the creation of its works for many years. Dwango has launched the OpenToonz project in cooperation with Digital Video and Studio Ghibli. OpenToonz can be used free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial projects. Available as an open-source so that anyone can modify its source code freely. We aim to develop a new platform for connecting the academic research with cutting edge animation production. -
17
Toon Boom Harmony
Toon Boom
Harmony 20, the industry's leading 2D animation software, brings the latest in digital drawing sensitivity to its brushes — every marking, every style, every texture you want to create and leave for the audience is felt. Rulers, guides, colour control & features as well as innovative deformers enrich your animation, bringing reality and fantasy within millimeters of each other. Artists express themselves through their work, creating distinctive markings on a surface — each as unique as their maker. The right tool can capture both the true essence of an image and offer a glimpse into the creative spirit of the person behind it. Create art and emotion in every style with one powerful end-to-end animation software. Whether you prefer paperless or cutout animation, Harmony 20 is helping to set the trends for award winning animation that is hitting the market by storm. The latest in lighting, shading, special effects and others give more life to your features and series.Starting Price: $24 per month -
18
LightWave 3D
NewTek
NewTek LightWave 3D® is designed for independent artists who desire control of their vision from start to finish. Affordable, complete, easy to learn and use, LightWave is well established as one of the leading 3D systems on the market. With the ability to model, animate and render stunningly realistic imagery and animation, LightWave allows you to create new worlds, build your brand and shatter expectations. LightWave 2020 refined and retooled. Don’t take our word for it — try LightWave 2020, unrestricted for yourself. Download and register to unlock a full-feature trial version of LightWave 2020 for Windows & Mac today. LightWave 2020 gives you the tools you need to deliver any project on time and on budget. Add the power and efficiency of LightWave 2020 to your pipeline today. And start creating with a stable, streamlined, effective workflow. Fresh. Fast. Easy. Proven.Starting Price: $995 -
19
RADiCAL
RADiCAL
RADiCAL was founded to develop the world’s most powerful computer vision technology focused on detecting and reconstructing 3D human motion from 2D content. AI-powered 3D motion capture — in the cloud and on every device. To achieve this, we are using multiple bodies of science in a proprietary configuration, including computer vision, deep learning and anthropometry. Our system continually learns and perpetually improves. In our minds, we will never truly be done. Our goal is to see the technology implemented across mobile, web and enterprise environments, seamlessly powering 3D animation in film, TV, art, gaming, AR/VR, as well as industrial and health applications.Starting Price: $8 per month -
20
AnimeEffects
AnimeEffects
AnimeEffects is a 2D keyframe animation tool based on deformation of polygon meshes. You can easily operate, quickly shape your idea, and remake at any time if you have changed your mind. You can import image files such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, and PSD for animation resources. For PSD, AnimeEffects supports layer clipping and many blending modes. (PSD is the multiple layer format of Adobe Photoshop and it is supported by various paint tools such as Easy Paint Tool SAI, and Clip Studio Paint, etc.) AnimeEffects supports graphics tablet operation and canvas rotation it’s well-known functions of a paint tool, and it enables intuitive deformation.Starting Price: Free -
21
Spine
Esoteric Software
Animation brings video games alive. We believe creating great 2D animation requires not only powerful software, but a powerful workflow. Spine is dedicated to 2D skeletal animation, providing an efficient workflow both for creating amazing animation and for integrating it into your games. Our live demos show a sample of what is possible with Spine, right in your browser window. Play animations in layers, manipulate skeletons dynamically, and much more. Spine Academy has everything you need to get started learning Spine. Whether you like learning on your own or prefer face-to-face workshops and courses, we got you covered. Check our changelog and roadmap to see what changed between Spine versions and what's being worked on, and don't forget to sign up to our community forum. Animating is an iterative process. Spine provides numerous tools to shape and refine your 2D animations.Starting Price: $69 one-time payment -
22
Pinreel
Pinreel
Create pro animated video content at the speed of light. A reels maker to make youtube shorts, TikTok, stories & promo video intros. Create social media content using over 1,000 professionally designed video templates, animated text & effects. With the intuitive drag-and-drop video editor, creating engaging social media content has never been simpler. Combine animated text, images, logos, stickers, and effects in just a few clicks. This reels maker app comes with a good selection of free templates, to get you started. Influencers can find the perfect animated video content, including music templates designed for TikTok, Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reel & Insta Stories. Unleash your creativity with our animated text, stickers, music, graphics, & effects. Combine your own images and videos to produce stunning social media content that will impress your followers.Starting Price: $4 per month -
23
Express Animate
NCH
Express Animate helps you create stunning animations using objects, images, illustrations, and videos. Choose from a wide array of effects and animation tools to add your creative flare to your project. Get creative with applying transformations and effects to image objects. Quickly convert a color object to black and white or sepia. Enhance an object by adjusting the color temperature or saturation. Use keyframes with the object properties to motion tween, zoom, rotate, and more. Add life to your characters and animated cartoons. Animate separate body parts or group multiple objects together to optimize the animation process. Use the timeline to move your character and create animations. Use multiple layers and keyframes to add special effects, audio, and more. Express Animate has advanced tools for experienced animators and graphic designers, including vector masks, onion skins, blending modes, and a graph editor for precise animation.Starting Price: $24.99 one-time payment -
24
ShortMotion
Tangens Inc.
The app, titled ShortMotion, makes motion-graphics creation easy by allowing users to animate text, pictures or videos using a simplified timeline where you add preset “actions” instead of keyframes; you choose from dozens of actions (move, spin, slide, wipe, mask, etc.), drag them along the timeline, adjust timing with ease, bounce or linear transitions, select from customizable templates, swap in your own media and music, and export in 1080p at 60 fps, optimized for social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. According to the developer, it’s not “just another video editor” but a tool designed specifically for motion design made simple. Pick from a collection of fun and ready-to-use templates. Swap out text, colors, media, and actions to make them your own. Choose tracks from your own library to add some character.Starting Price: Free -
25
Cartoon Animator
Reallusion
Cartoon Animator 4 (formerly known as CrazyTalk Animator) is a 2D animation software designed for both abilities of entry and productivity. You can turn images to animated characters, control characters with your expressions, generate lip-sync animation from audio, accomplish 3D parallax scenes, produce 2D visual effects, access content resources, and wield a comprehensive photoshop pipeline to rapidly customize characters and create content. Doing facial animation is complicated, more so if you wish to rotate the face from one side to another. Reallusion breaks the limitations of 2D art, by offering a simple and practical way for 2D animators. Now character animation is simple and quick with Cartoon Animator but also works well with After Effects for a professional finished look. Through the AE script, you can reconstruct exported CTA projects in AE layers.Starting Price: $29.95 one-time payment -
26
Principle
Principle for Mac
Animate Your Ideas, Design Better Apps. Principle makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces. Whether you're designing the flow of a multi-screen app, or new interactions and animations, Principle helps you create designs that look and feel amazing. Use Principle in beautiful dark mode and import designs from Figma. There are a lot of things you might want to design: a short animation, a slick interaction, or an extensive multi-screen app. No matter what you're doing, you can do it with Principle. Principle's timeline makes it quick work to illustrate the perfect bounce, ease, and pop. Want to design a totally new interaction? Principle gives you the freedom to experiment without limiting you to pre-defined transitions. It's a breeze to design the flow of a multi-screen app; and when you're done you'll have a bird's-eye view of all your screens. With artboards, magic animations and a timeline, using Principle will give you Déjà vu.Starting Price: $129 one-time fee -
27
Toonly
Etison
With Toonly, you can create professional animated explainer videos in minutes even if you’ve never created a video before. And the software comes with tons of functionality, so your videos turn out amazing—rivaling those put together by the pros. Not a video designer? Not a problem! Just select a background for your video, then click-and-drag characters onto it. Animate them by clicking on your mouse or by holding the Control key down, if you’re on a Mac. And that’s it. It couldn’t be any easier. Within minutes, you can create your first animated explainer video. Toonly doesn’t use stock images or photos. All of its images were custom drawn by our professional graphic design team (a team made up of 12 full-time designers), over the course of the past 5 months. You won’t find higher-quality animations anywhere on the planet. With Toonly, you’ll get 510 character images. 30 characters with 17 different poses each. Plus, you'll also get 81 different backgrounds and scenes.Starting Price: $39 per month -
28
Explaindio
Explaindio
Explandio is an all-in-one video creator that focuses on helping you create attention grabbing, professional looking 2D, 3D, explainer, and training videos in just minutes. Explandio is focused on creating amazing video content to help you get more leads and make more sales. Explaindio Videos grab attention. That means it stops visitors as they scroll through their social media and gets them to watch your video. Using Explaindio you can engage and attract more visitors to your website, to help you get more leads and sales! Brands like Starbucks, M&M’s, Wendy’s, Samsung and many other fortune 500 companies use this style of video to make an announcement, tell a story, promote a product, or even promote an event. Use them in your video to elevate the video, share a stronger story, and get more views.Starting Price: $37 per month -
29
PhotoMirage
Alludo
Beautifully animated. Simply uncomplicated. Create mesmerizing photo animations in minutes. Whether you want to boost social engagement, drive results on the web, or simply have fun with photos, PhotoMirage™ is your key to creating attention-grabbing photo animations that engage, inspire and transfix. Drag and drop Motion Arrows over the parts of the image you want to move. Plot Anchor Points around the areas you want to keep still. Hit Play to watch your image transform into a looping animation, then save or share. Moving images have viral appeal. Not only do they engage an audience’s emotions, but they also spark intrigue. They are like an illusion—not quite a photo and not quite a video. Get noticed in a whole new way! Use the hypnotic appeal of photo animation to remedy decreasing attention spans and an overabundance of static visual content. PhotoMirage provides a refreshing way to attract attention in a competitive digital landscape. -
30
Cinema 4D
Maxon
3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.Starting Price: $16.58 per month
