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EffectCraft is an open-source Adobe After Effects alternative in Rust
ArtCraft, the open-source team behind PhotoCraft and PdfCraft, released EffectCraft, a Rust motion graphics tool that reached 7,090 stars 16 days after the repository was created.
Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA free motion graphics tool that a coding agent can drive lets a marketing team run product animations without paying for an After Effects seat per person. The template re-renders with new copy or new colours by itself.
A free motion graphics tool that ships 306 effects, every keyframe shortcut After Effects uses, and an MCP server that lets a coding agent run the real interface is now the alternative that marketing teams and video editors on an Adobe After Effects subscription did not have last month. EffectCraft, the tenth app from the ArtCraft open-source team, is a Rust compositor that the project pitches as a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe After Effects. The GitHub repository was created on 1 October 2026 and had 7,090 stars by 17 October.
EffectCraft runs on macOS, Windows and Linux as a native app, and in the browser through WebAssembly. The source is on GitHub under Apache-2.0 or MIT, and the ArtCraft organisation on GitHub has 54,305 followers and 66 public repositories dating from January 2021. The project marks itself as alpha and says it is "young and moving fast".
What the project claims about coverage
The README says EffectCraft covers "about 91%" of After Effects features and estimates it is "about 45% of the way to replacing After Effects for professional work". It states that all 298 of After Effects' effects are there, plus a handful more, for a total of 306, with the same parameter names, order and defaults in each. These are the project's own numbers against its own weighting, and the README points at a parity measurement file and a gaps file that list every known shortfall.
How the pipeline is built
Every video and audio encoder is pure Rust. H.264, ProRes and AAC come from FilmCraft, EffectCraft's sibling project, and VP9, AV1, HEVC and Opus are written in EffectCraft itself, so a user does not need FFmpeg on their machine. Project files are versioned JSON with the extension .ecproj, so a diff on two revisions reads cleanly in a code review. After Effects uses a binary project file. The 3D compositor runs on wgpu with native paths for Metal, Vulkan and DX12. Lottie import and export are built in, so a composition can go to a web page or an app without a plugin.
The MCP server and the command line
EffectCraft ships a tool called effectcraft-cli that runs a project through the render queue from the command line, and a control channel on a chosen port that accepts JSON lines to run commands, click any widget by its automation id, or take a screenshot. The MCP server is opt-in and gives a coding agent the same addressable interface. Every menu item, timeline drag and property edit goes through one command registry, so the command line, the control channel and the MCP server all drive the real app the project ships. Each one talks to the same code as the mouse.
A marketing team that pays for After Effects only to re-render monthly product animations with new copy or new colours can wire effectcraft-cli or the MCP server into a template. A professional video editor who relies on the exact way an After Effects plugin or a particle system behaves should wait: the alpha label applies to those, and the project says so.
Source
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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