Cavalry is a procedural 2D motion design application from Scene Group. It leans on generators, dynamics and array-driven behaviour rather than hand-placing every keyframe, which makes it unusually strong at systematic, generative motion — the kind of work where a hundred elements need to move as one idea.
Canva announced its acquisition of Cavalry in February 2026, and by April 2026 Cavalry Pro had been made free. Cavalry's own site describes the free version as full-featured with no restrictions or payment needed, requiring a free Canva account; third-party coverage places that change from version 2.7 onward, with enterprise features such as SSO remaining on a paid Canva Enterprise arrangement.
That changes the shape of this page. We are not going to compare prices, because a free, full-featured tool wins that comparison and everyone knows it. The reasons people still look elsewhere are about where the software runs, what it costs you in time before it earns its keep, and how the work gets reviewed.
It is a desktop application. Cavalry runs on macOS and Windows, natively on Apple Silicon and Intel. There is no browser version. If you work on a Chromebook or an iPad, if your laptop is locked down by IT, if you switch between a studio machine and a borrowed one, or if you simply do not want another install to maintain, a free desktop app is still an app you cannot open.
The onboarding cost is real. A procedural, generator-first model is a genuinely different way to think about motion, and that is exactly why experienced users rate it so highly. It is also why a marketer who needs one animated banner this afternoon will not get there. Free removes the licence barrier, not the learning one.
A project file is not a link. Desktop work is reviewed by exporting a clip, uploading it somewhere and waiting for comments to come back in a different app. Browser tools let a reviewer open a URL. If your bottleneck is approval rounds rather than authoring, that difference costs more per week than any subscription.
Its export list is narrow in one specific direction. Cavalry's site names Lottie export prominently among its features. It did not enumerate a wider format list on the page we read, so if you need a specific delivery format, confirm it on cavalry.studio before you plan around it.
Who it is for: motion designers, marketers and founders whose animation ships as a video file, and anyone who needs 3D, physics or materials alongside flat vectors without installing anything.
KinoViz runs in any modern browser with WebGL 2, on any operating system, with nothing to install and no minimum OS version to satisfy. It is a scene tool rather than a generative one: a keyframe timeline with 40 easing curves and per-property control, a pen tool, boolean operations, trim path and effector arrays, plus the parts a 2D-only tool cannot reach — GLB and GLTF import with DRACO compression up to 50 MB per model on every plan including Free, Rapier physics, liquid glass, reeded and frosted glass, liquid metal, glow and bloom, ASCII and halftone treatments, 22 procedural gradient backgrounds and 42 text-effect presets. An AI assistant, in Beta from the Creator plan, drafts a scene from a prompt that you then edit by hand.
Where it does not match Cavalry: procedural generators and expression-driven systems are not its model, and it has no Lottie export.
Export: MP4 (H.264), WebM (VP9) and single PNG frames on every plan, plus a .kino source file from Creator upward. No Lottie, no GIF. Transparent output is the PNG frame only. Rendering happens locally in your browser, so there is no upload and no render queue. Resolution rises by plan: 540p at 24 fps with a watermark on Free, 1080p at 30 fps on Creator, up to 1920px on the short edge at 60 fps on Pro. See export formats and the 3D system.
Collaboration: single seat today. A team workspace sits on the Studio plan, and publish links and web embeds are planned there too, but Studio is Coming Soon and not yet purchasable — worth knowing if shareable review links are your reason for leaving the desktop.
Who it is for: teams producing social and product-marketing animation at volume, who want templates and multiplayer editing more than generative depth.
Jitter is the browser tool that most directly answers the "a project file is not a link" complaint. Multiplayer editing, a large template catalogue and a workflow built for speed. It is 2D only, with no 3D import, no physics and no shader materials, and it will not do what Cavalry's generators do — but for a weekly stream of campaign assets it finishes the job while a procedural setup is still being built.
Export: video, GIF and Lottie, with Lottie available on the free plan as of September 2026. Paid plans add ProRes and WebM; higher tiers add transparent export and frame-by-frame controls.
Starting price: a free plan with watermarked output, then paid tiers priced per editor. Jitter renders its prices dynamically on jitter.video/pricing, so check the current rate there rather than trusting a figure quoted elsewhere.
Full comparison: KinoViz vs Jitter, and a wider shortlist at Jitter alternatives.
Who it is for: product designers and game developers whose animation responds to state or input rather than playing as a clip.
If part of your Cavalry output ends up as Lottie because it has to live inside an app, Rive is the more complete version of that idea. You animate vectors, wire them to a state machine, and ship a .riv file played by runtimes for JavaScript, iOS, Android, Flutter, React, React Native, C++, Unity and Unreal. Bone-based rigging and mesh deformation make character animation practical in a way nothing else here matches.
Export: .riv runtime file, plus MP4, WebM, GIF and PNG sequence video export on paid plans, as of September 2026.
Starting price: Free $0 per seat per month, Cadet $9 per seat per month with a three-seat maximum, Voyager $32 per seat per month, Enterprise $120 per seat per month, as listed on rive.app/pricing in September 2026.
Full comparison: KinoViz vs Rive.
Who it is for: web designers and front-end developers animating icons and illustrations that ship into markup.
SVGator covers the part of Cavalry's output that becomes a web asset, and it covers it natively. One project emits an animated SVG for the page and a Lottie JSON for the app, and the result scales to any density instead of being a fixed-size render. It is single-asset focused rather than scene focused, with no 3D and no procedural generators.
Export: animated SVG with CSS, SMIL or JS on every tier, watermarked on Free; Lottie JSON plus React Native and Flutter from Starter upward; GIF, WebP and MP4 from Pro upward, with video up to 3840 x 2160 at 60 fps.
Starting price: annual billing lists Free $0, Starter $20/month, Pro $24/month and Team $27 per seat per month with a three-seat minimum, as of September 2026.
Full comparison: KinoViz vs SVGator.
Who it is for: product designers animating the same layers their design system publishes.
Figma Motion adds a timeline, keyframes, easing and spring curves inside Figma Design, so there is no migration step at all. That is the one advantage no standalone tool can match. It is 2D only, has no Lottie export as of September 2026, and Figma's documentation still describes it as being in open beta.
Export: MP4, WebM, GIF and SVG, plus CSS, JSON or React code from Dev Mode. Figma states that exporting above 1920 x 1080 or above 30 FPS requires a paid plan, and that the motion agent, animated-component publishing and high-resolution export require a Full seat on a paid plan.
Starting price: available on any plan with edit access; a Professional Full seat lists at $16 per month as of September 2026.
Full comparison: KinoViz vs Figma Motion, and a shortlist at Figma Motion alternatives.
Who it is for: marketers and non-designers who need finished content quickly and are not chasing motion craft.
Worth including precisely because Canva now owns Cavalry. Its animation model is applying entrance, exit and emphasis effects and adjusting timing, not per-property keyframing, and it is honest to say that is a different sport. What it offers instead is breadth: its free plan alone lists over 1.6 million templates and 4.7 million photos, videos, graphics and audio files, plus brand kits and a full design suite around the animation.
Export: MP4 and GIF among a wide range of design outputs.
Starting price: Free $0, Pro $180 per year (about $15 per month), Business $250 per year per person, Enterprise on request, as of September 2026.
Full comparison: KinoViz vs Canva.
| If your reason for leaving is… | Pick |
|---|---|
| No desktop install possible, any OS, any machine | KinoViz |
| You need 3D, physics or shader materials in the scene | KinoViz |
| Review by link and multiplayer editing, today | Jitter |
| The animation must run inside an app and react | Rive |
| The output should stay a scalable vector asset | SVGator |
| Your artwork already lives in a Figma file | Figma Motion |
| Volume of everyday content, fast, from templates | Canva |
| Deep procedural and generative 2D motion | Stay on Cavalry — it is free and nothing here matches it |
That last row is the honest one. If generators, dynamics and array-driven systems are why you use Cavalry, no browser tool on this list replaces them, and the licence now costs nothing. Leave for the platform, the onboarding cost or the review loop — not because you expect to find the same feature set elsewhere.
For a wider survey, see best browser-based animation tools in 2026. If your starting point is Adobe rather than Cavalry, After Effects alternatives online covers that route, and all comparisons lists every head-to-head.
Start free — three projects, no credit card, with the 3D editor, physics and keyframe timeline included on the free plan. MP4, WebM and PNG export are available on every plan. For clean 1080p or 1920px output without a watermark, plus premium materials and AI credits, Pro includes a seven-day free trial.
Competitor details are based on public information as of September 2026 and may change; verify on the vendor's site.
