Lottie vs GIF: What’s the difference?

Got your web hosting sorted? You’ll probably want to bring your static website to life with stunning animations. But which format do you choose – Lottie or GIF?

GIFs are rather well known, but this may be the first time you’ve heard of Lottie. First, you need to understand the differences and benefits of each. Let's take a look at how they compare, and which of the two would be more beneficial for your site.

What is Lottie?

Lottie, an open-source animation file format, gets its name from Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger, a German film director, and is known for its compact size and high-quality visuals. 

Developers and designers use it to make, edit, test, and show interactive animations – and because it works so well and can do many things, lots of apps now use Lottie animations to get users more involved and to improve talks on their platforms. 

In fact, Airbnb first made Lottie! It lets you take animations from Adobe After Effects and turn them into a JSON-based file format using a plugin. This method helps put vector-based animations into user interfaces, mixing good performance with aesthetic appeal – hence why both developers and designers find Lottie so useful.

Why Lottie?

Lottie animations are vector-based, so they’re usually much smaller than GIFs. However, they still retain the same quality, if not better. This means that they work well on mobile devices, including Android, iOS and React Native apps, without having to make major adjustments. You can also fully customise Lottie animations to suit your brand with minimal effort – from the background colour to the animation speed, you can modify just about anything. Lottie animations can even be converted to GIFs for socials.

Can I use Lottie on my WordPress site?

If you have WordPress Hosting, the short answer is yes! You can liven up your WordPress site with fun, colourful Lottie animations without having any design or coding experience. Simply go to Plugins in your WordPress Dashboard. Easy!

Plus, if you want to improve your WordPress page loading times, converting GIFs into Lottie can help with this.

The benefits of Lottie

1. Fully customisable

Lottie animations are in JSON format, and can have multiple elements changed in its code – rather than having to go back to an image or video editor to change things like size or colour. This allows for fast editing when required. 

2. Smaller file size

Lottie animations are generally more lightweight than GIFs and videos. This efficiency stems from the fact that Lottie files utilise a vector-based approach and are encoded in a JSON format, which outlines the animation through shapes and coordinates instead of capturing each frame as a bitmap image. This not only decreases the data required for rendering the animations, but also enhances their efficiency for both download and rendering processes, leading to substantial bandwidth savings and improved loading times.

3. Scalable

What’s great about Lottie animations is their vector format. It means you can scale the design as small or as large as you want, and it won’t ruin the quality! The biggest benefit of this is that the ability to scale ensures that a single file can be used across various platforms and devices with different resolutions and screen sizes – removing the necessity for multiple versions. 

4. Interactive

Lottie animations do more than just play back a moving animation. They can let users interact with the animation itself too! Since they render in real time, you can control the animation's settings through code. For instance, developers can tweak things like speed, direction, and looping. They can also make the animation react to user actions such as clicks, swipes, or scrolls. 

5. Multi-platform support

Lottie animations work on many platforms and devices, including Android, iOS, React Native, and various other web technologies. This wide compatibility exists because of the broad support through Lottie libraries and players created by the community, which are well-maintained and often updated. 

6. Transparent backgrounds

Unlike GIFs, Lottie has the ability to support transparent backgrounds. This lets animations embed within webpages or app interfaces without extra masking or editing. This feature is helpful for designers and developers who want to add complex animations without changing or blocking UI elements behind them. Transparent backgrounds mean you can put Lottie animations over different colour backgrounds or content areas without borders or boxes. 

What is a GIF?

GIF stands for Graphical Interchange Format and they've been enriching iconic memes for years – like the classic below. But their use goes beyond laughs and social media. GIFs bring boring old web pages to life. If you’re unfamiliar with this bitmap image format, they’re essentially a series of images (or videos with no sound) that loop continuously, without having to hit ‘play’.

Why GIF?

GIFs can display text, so they’re great for quickly conveying an important message on your site or social media channels. They can also handle larger file sizes, though this isn’t necessarily ideal on websites where speed is everything.

The benefits of GIF

1. Quick to create

Almost anyone can make GIFs using the plethora of online tools that let you turn video clips or a bunch of pictures into GIFs with just a few clicks. You don't need fancy editing or animation programs to create GIFs, which means even those who aren't tech-savvy can make a GIF quite quickly. This comes in handy for people or companies who need to make visuals without spending a lot of time on it.

2. No design experience required

Making GIFs is easy and doesn't really need any design skills. You'll find tons of user-friendly tools, websites, and apps that let anyone transform existing pictures or short video clips into looping animations. These tools have easy-to-use interfaces and ready-made options to tweak the loop, speed, and often add filters or effects. 

3. Can display text

GIFs have the ability to include text right in the animation, which makes them a flexible way to send messages to others. People often use GIFs with text for memes, to stress a point, or to make simple but effective call-to-action buttons. By adding text on top, GIFs can share more details than a still image. That’s  why they’re so popular on social media!

4. Convey messages quickly and easily

GIFs can help get messages across quickly and without needing sound or a long watch time. Because they loop, they deliver the content right away and on repeat, which makes the message clear and easy to grasp. GIFs are short and often funny, so they're great for catching the eye of people scrolling through a feed or looking at a website, giving them a quick laugh or helping them understand something.

5. Can handle larger file sizes

While GIFs may have larger file sizes than newer formats like SVG or compressed video clips, they can handle this without causing major issues when loading or playing. In situations where file size isn't a big deal, or when you're worried about losing quality through compression, GIFs can show animations without the need for heavy tweaking that other formats might require. 

However, just keep in mind that they might take longer to load compared to more streamlined formats.

Are we moving away from GIFs?

The short answer is – yes and no. GIFs are a staple of internet content and pop culture, but while web developers still favour GIFs, the file format has its shortcomings.

For instance, GIFs have a colour limit that affects the quality of images and videos. Also, GIFs are pixel-based raster images – meaning they lose sharpness when enlarged, which can make for a poor user experience.

However, GIF files are smaller than some other video formats, which makes them a popular file format to embed into websites to improve page loading times. This makes them a good choice if you want to add one or two to a website or app. Even so, using too many GIFs in one page element or across a webpage can slow down how fast the site or app loads.

Lottie vs GIF – Which is better?

Even though GIFs are widely used on a variety of platforms, Lottie has a wide set of advantages you may not have considered for your site. Let’s explore a few of them and compare them to GIFs.

1. File size

Lottie animations use vector graphics, allowing them to retain exceptional quality regardless of size, while typically offering smaller file sizes than GIFs for comparable animation quality. This makes them an excellent option for high-resolution displays – and therefore a great universal choice. 

On the other hand, GIFs are composed of bitmap images, which can lead to larger file sizes and potential pixelation when enlarged, diminishing their visual attractiveness on high-resolution screens. This is why they’re more often used in more casual contexts, such as instant messaging.

2. Performance and compatibility

Lottie animations have better performance because you can scale them without losing quality. Their small file sizes don't slow down performance, which matters a lot for mobile apps. They're also flexible, supporting interactive animations that respond to user actions. They work on iOS, Android, and web platforms too.

While GIFs work on all browsers and platforms without needing extra libraries, their bigger file sizes can make pages load slower and use more data. This might make the experience worse for users on mobile devices.

3. Creation of assets

To make Lottie animations, you need to know how to use Adobe After Effects. Then, you can use a plugin to export them to the Lottie format. This can be hard for people who don't have After Effects or don't know how to use it.

You can make and edit GIFs with many different tools. These range from simple online converters to more complex software like Adobe Photoshop. Because they're easy to access, many people choose GIFs for quick, simple animations.

The verdict

Both Lottie and GIF create visually stunning animations for your website, but which is best? Well, it depends on how you’re using it! Lottie animations are great for high-quality, interactive visuals, whereas GIFs are more suitable for simpler animations or displaying text.

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