Free, open-source alternatives to Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate, the successor to Flash Professional, is a 2D animation program: you draw characters and backgrounds, place them on layers in a timeline, and bring them to life with keyframes, tweens and bone rigs before exporting video, GIFs or HTML5 content. Adobe now keeps it in maintenance mode, with fixes but no new features. The open-source apps below share the core job of drawing artwork and animating it frame by frame or between keyframes.

Synfig Studio is the closest match for vector work, since it interpolates shapes between keyframes and supports bone rigs, so characters move without redrawing every frame. OpenToonz is a full production tool with an exposure sheet, scanning and compositing effects. Pencil2D keeps things simple, with bitmap and vector layers on a plain timeline for traditional hand-drawn animation.