Free Spine Alternatives
The best free alternative to Spine is DragonBones, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 10 alternatives to Spine and eight of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to Spine are Synfig Studio, enve, AnimeEffects and Live2D Cubism.
Spine alternatives are mainly Animation Makers but may also be Game Development Tools. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Spine.DragonBones has a skeletal animation design panel named "DragonBonesDesignPanel" and a 2D skeletal animation library based on ActionScript.
DragonBones vs Spine opinions
It has a pretty similar UI and feature set. It can also export projects as Spine files to be used in your games (unfortunately it exports Spine data only as .json files and not as binary .skel, but it's still pretty nice).
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
Synfig is a free and open-source, industrial-strength, vector-based 2D animation app designed for producing feature-film animations. It eliminates the need to create animations frame by frame. It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Synfig Studio vs Spine opinions
Synfig isn't bone-based 2D animation
you can't get it into games and it isn't a runtime
You can't make game animations in Synfig Studio, only animation clips and animation movies
- Free • Open Source
- Windows
- Linux
Enve is a free and open-source 2D animation app. It can create both vector and raster animations and even use sound and video files. It has been created with flexibility and expandability in mind.
AnimeEffects is a 2D keyframe animation tool based on deformation of polygon meshes.
Live2D is the world's first drawing technology to enable 3D rendering of 2D images. This technology supports a variety of portable consoles and smartphones, and Live2D is already being utilized for games that take advantage of the unique characteristics of hand drawn artwork.
Free and open-source software for creating amazing 2D motion graphics and vector animations.
JPixel is an editor for making pixel art animations and tilesets.
Discontinued
Official product page unavailable.
Build, rig, and animate 2D characters optimized for game engines and applications.