Comparing
Production-ready animations and gestures for React — declarative, physics-based, with layout animations and exit transitions.
3D graphics in the browser — WebGL-powered scenes, lights, cameras, and geometries with a beginner-friendly JavaScript API.
| Metric | framer-motion | three |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Intermediate ✓ | Advanced |
| Weekly downloads | 7.0M↑ | 3.0M |
| Latest version | v12.6.2 | v0.170.0 |
| Recipes | 2 | 2 |
framer-motion only
Shared
three only
React apps needing UI animations: page transitions, list reordering, drag-and-drop, hover effects, scroll-triggered reveals, and exit animations.
3D product viewers, data visualizations in 3D, games, interactive art, generative design, architecture visualization, any WebGL experience.
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.
2D graphics (use canvas API or SVG), simple CSS animations, when you need a full game engine (use Babylon.js or Unity WebGL).
framer-motion
three