Comparing
The professional-grade JavaScript animation library — animate anything (DOM, CSS, SVG, Canvas, WebGL) with a timeline-based API.
Fast multiline text measurement and layout without DOM reflow
| Metric | gsap | @chenglou/pretext |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Intermediate | Intermediate |
| Weekly downloads | 2.0M↑ | 0 |
| Latest version | v3.12.7 | v0.0.3 |
| Recipes | 2 | 5↑ |
gsap only
Shared
@chenglou/pretext only
Marketing landing pages, scroll-driven storytelling, complex animation sequences, SVG/logo animations, parallax effects, or any animation that needs to be framework-agnostic.
Use pretext when you need to know text dimensions before rendering — virtualised scrolling lists where you must know item heights upfront, text flowing around images or arbitrary obstacles, dynamic subtitle/caption positioning, detecting content overflow at build time, or any animation that requires text metrics on every frame.
Simple React UI micro-interactions where framer-motion or CSS is simpler. GSAP's free tier doesn't include ScrollSmoother and some plugins commercially.
Pretext only measures plain text — it cannot handle HTML markup, inline images, or mixed rich content. For simple cases where you measure a single element once on mount, the browser's built-in ResizeObserver or getBoundingClientRect is simpler and sufficient. Pretext's two-phase API adds conceptual overhead that is only justified when measurements are frequent or happen before render.
gsap
@chenglou/pretext
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