Comparing
Production-ready animations and gestures for React — declarative, physics-based, with layout animations and exit transitions.
Declarative client-side routing for React — maps URLs to components with nested routes, loaders, and actions.
| Metric | framer-motion | react-router |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Intermediate | Intermediate |
| Weekly downloads | 7.0M | 11.0M↑ |
| Latest version | v12.6.2 | v7.1.1 |
| Recipes | 2 | 3↑ |
framer-motion only
Shared
react-router only
React apps needing UI animations: page transitions, list reordering, drag-and-drop, hover effects, scroll-triggered reveals, and exit animations.
Any React SPA needing URL-based navigation, nested layouts (dashboard sidebar + content), data loading tied to routes, form actions, protected routes.
Non-React projects, performance-critical animations running at 120fps with many particles (use CSS or WebGL), or very simple opacity/transform transitions where CSS is sufficient.
Next.js (use its file-based router). Remix (built on React Router but adds SSR). Very simple apps with only one or two views — a state variable suffices.
framer-motion
react-router