Cavalry vs Rive Comparison 2026
Both cover motion graphics & animation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Procedural 2D animation, free for individuals
Interactive animation that ships into an app
At a glance
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Cavalry | Rive | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | From $9 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Not stated | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Cavalry
Procedural 2D animation, free for individuals
Cavalry animates by rules rather than by keyframe: shapes driven by generators, behaviours and data, so a hundred elements move together without a hundred edits. Motion designers use it for the work that would be tedious anywhere else, and it exports to the formats a video timeline expects. The company states plainly that individuals pay nothing. Coming from a keyframe tool, the model takes a while to click, and then it is hard to leave.
Our note
The free licence removes the only reason not to try it, so the real question is whether the procedural way of thinking suits your work. Give it a project with repetition in it, because a single moving logo will not show you anything After Effects does not already do.
Rive
Interactive animation that ships into an app
Rive is the one to reach for when the animation has to respond to something rather than play. A state machine is built alongside the artwork, and runtimes drop the result into a real product. For a creator that mostly means website and app work rather than video, and the learning curve is closer to a design tool than to a filter.
Our note
Rive and Jitter get compared and should not be. Jitter makes a video; Rive makes a thing that reacts. If nobody is going to click it, Rive is the harder tool for no gain.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.