GreenSock-JS VS framer/motion

This direct manipulation allows you to leverage robust animation libraries like GSAP or Anime.js, which require direct DOM access to perform optimally.

I've been looking for a small project to do that would let me play with Greensock (GSAP), specifically a bit with some SVG files I generated with Corel Vector. When I saw the frontend challenge and had an afternoon at work with downtime between a few projects, I knew it'd be a great opportunity to explore a bit!

https://pixijs.com/ and https://gsap.com/. All of the source code for my posts can be found at https://github.com/samwho/visualisations :)

The GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is a web animation library that provides the logic for adding animation to any site powered by JavaScript. React, being built on top of JavaScript, falls under this category. GSAP is an extremely fun animation tool to use because it offers a great deal of flexibility, you can animate anything using GSAP — texts, images, scroll actions, SVGs, UI interactions, anything!

GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform)

If you want animations look into GSAP

gsap

Green Sock has over 16,400 GitHub stars and 400k weekly NPM downloads.

The two most popular choices now (circa Jan 2024) are React Transition Group, started in 2016, and Framer Motion, started in 2018. I'm not too familiar with the former, so this article solely dives into the workings of AnimatePresence from Framer Motion and how it's able to enable exit animations.

Install Framer Motion with npm install framer-motion.

GitHub: https://github.com/framer/motion

At this point, I was already using a tilt component (react-parallax-tilt) in my portfolio, and after checking this page I had the general idea of how it should be done, a container with transform-style: preserve-3d, with two children, one tilt and the other an image, both having backface-visibility: hidden and the tilt being rotated to face backward at the start. For the animation, I decided to use framer-motion because I was already familiar with it and knew it had what was needed to get the job done (and I'm glad I did because later I needed to await the animation and it was easy with framer-motion).

Two of the most popular animation libraries for React include React Spring [26.1k+ GitHub stars] and Framer Motion [19.6k+ GitHub stars], but there are many to choose from. Arafat Islam has a great list of animation libraries here.

Why should you consider using Framer Motion in your React project? Framer Motion is a fairly popular and actively maintained library, with 19k stars on GitHub, and plenty of resources to support it.

Framer Motion has over 18,000 GitHub stars and 2.2M weekly NPM downloads.