2D Animation Resources: The Complete List [2023]

If you came here looking to find a list of the best 2D animation tools, then you came to the right place.

This is 50 of the best 2D animation tools, script and platform from years of making 2D animation and submissions from the lovely community. Hope you’ll find something here that is useful. 

If you’ve got a suggestion for a tool, you can submit it here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have time to update now. But I’m saving all the suggestions for the day I can.)

  • After Effects
  • Animate
  • Asana
  • AudioJungle
  • Behance
  • Blender
  • BQ_HeadRig
  • Boil it
  • Corsair K55 RGB
  • DaFonts
  • Daz Studio
  • Dribbble
  • Duik Bassel
  • Ease and Wizz
  • Ergotron LX Arm
  • Filestage
  • Fiverr
  • Frame.io
  • Free Music Archive
  • Freepik
  • Fugue Music
  • Freelance Contract Bundle
  • Genovation KB170L
  • Howard Wimshurst
  • Humaaans
  • Hype
  • Iconstore
  • Illustrator
  • Joysticks n’ Sliders
  • Krita
  • Learn Squared
  • Limber
  • Loom
  • Maya
  • Moho
  • Motion v2
  • Mural
  • OpenToonz
  • Overlord
  • Ouch
  • Pencil 2D
  • Photoshop
  • Pond5
  • PremiumBeat
  • Procreate
  • Rubberhose
  • School of Motion
  • Sort it
  • Stop Motion Studio
  • Toon Boom Harmony
  • TVPaint Animation
  • TupiTube
  • Upwork
  • Vimeo
  • Vectr
  • Wacom Cintiq 13HD
  • Wacom Intous S
 

Asana

Asana is a project management tool to organize and plan workflows, projects, and team communication. With features like deadlines, priorities, and visualization, Asana is an effective tool to work through multiple stages of a project more easily. Best of all, it’s free up till the team hit 15 members. 

Official Website:
https://asana.com/

Blender

Blender is a free and open-source 2D & 3D computer graphics software tool. you can see the hero film project (2018) that was created with Blender Greace Pencil capabilities. (h/t @juank_mg)

Do donate and support them (if you end up loving the software)

Official Website:
https://www.blender.org/

Dafont

Font library

As a user-powered font library, Dafont has an insanely wide range of unique fonts. The Dafont forum is also available if you want to ask questions and suggestions about which font to use for your project.

  • Fonts available :170,000+
  • Searchable : Yes, with filters.
  • Font Categories : Public Domain, Free, Free for Personal Use, Donationware, and Shareware.

Official Website:
https://www.dafont.com

Dribbble

Dribbble is the community where designers share, connect, and get hired. Images, gif, and video.  Dribbble showcases an active community of creative and design professionals –  a goldmine for inspiration seekers.

Official Website:
https://dribbble.com/

Duik Bassel

Duik is more like a tool set. Compared to other rigging tools, Duik has more ready-to-use scripts that can help you design and animate your characters faster. Here’s an example of Duik Bassel in action.

Official Website:
https://rainboxprod.coop/en/tools/duik/

Ease and Wizz

The After Effects plugin to add flavour to the traditional Easy Ease (F9). Create new ways of moving layers with a set of expressions. Have a look at their intro video to learn the secret sauce. (H/T @reygular)

Official Website: 
https://aescripts.com/ease-and-wizz/

Fiverr

Fiverr is a platform where freelancers can sell their services to employers from all over the world, starting from $5 per gig. Fiverr attracts to low-budget employers – which makes it a great place for brushing your skills for smaller projects to kickstart your online freelancing career. Fiverr charges a 20% commission fees.

Official Website:
https://www.fiverr.com/

Freepik

Freepik is a library of free visual assets in various formats such as .psd (Photoshop), .ai (Illustrator), icons, and stock photos. With more than 1 million free content, you won’t have to worry about running out of asset to choose from.

  • Illustration Library
  • Searchable with filters
  • 1m+ Illustrations available


Official Website:

https://www.freepik.com/

Free Music Archive

Free Music Archive offers a huge selection of curated tracks from various genres. You can also download clips without having to register. Everything available on the site is free,  but you have the option to ‘tip’ artists via PayPal.

Songs Available : 5,000+
Sign in : No
Searchable : Yes
License : Creative Common

Official Website:
http://freemusicarchive.org/

Fugue Music

Their tagline says it all: “Much, much more picky than other marketplaces. Much, much cheaper than Hans Zimmer. In fact, it’s free for a link.”

Sign in : Yes
Searchable : Yes
License : Creative Common

Official Website:
https://icons8.com/music/

Howard Wimshurst

Howard is an award winning animator, film maker and artist. He creates in-depth video analysis and tutorials in animation production, art and creative storytelling. Check out his Naruto’s fight scene breakdown. 

You can support him on Patreon.

Official Channel: 
https://www.youtube.com/user/HowardWimshurst/videos

Humaaans

Humaaaans, as the name implies, is a design library to mix-&-match illustrations of people. You can customise their positions, clothing, colours, and hairstyle. You can add scenes and use the power of libraries to make it your own. You can also add scenes and make it your own. Created by Pablo Stanley (@pablostanley).

Official Website:
https://www.humaaans.com/

Icons8

A pretty extensive icons for all your projects. 

  • Icon Available : 100K+
  • Searchable : Yes

 

Official Website:
https://icons8.com/icons

Iconstore

Free icon library

As of writing this, there are more than 230 free icon packs available for download, ranging from animals related icons to gaming icons. The icon packs consist of three styles: colored icons, glyph icons, and outlines.

  • Icon Packs Available : 230+
  • Searchable : Yes, with 25 categories and 3 filters.

Official Website:
http://iconstore.co

Krita

Krita is a free and open-source painting & sketching software. It is great for comic book artists, illustrators, and concept artists. Check out Ed Tadeo Youtube channel for great example done on with Krita. (h/t @juank_mg)

Do donate and support them (if you end up loving the software)

Official Website:
https://krita.org/en/

Loom

Loom is a screen recording app available on Chrome and Desktop.  If you are working remotely, this save me so much time and hassle trying to find visual reference and words to explain ideas. The app records and upload your video instant. By far, the smoothest and most magical experience with screen recording. 

Official Website:
https://www.loom.com/

Moho Pro

Moho Pro, formerly known as Anime Studio, is 2d animation software designed for professionals looking for an alternative when creating quality animations with the additional tool for frame-by-frame animation. The Moho Debut is a low-cost version of the software and for beginner animators.

Key features

  • Enhanced freehand drawing tools.
  • Beizer handles for more design control and optimized for animation.
  • Smart warp feature to customize meshes to bend, twist and animate assets.
  • Realistic motion blur.
  • Animation for multiple layers at the same time.

Official Website:
https://my.smithmicro.com/anime-studio-pro.htmlfavourite

OpenToonz

Opentoonz is a free and open-source 2D production software tool developed by Dwango in Japan. Check out the animated shorts.

The software has been part of the process of almost all of works of Studio Ghibli. After “Arrietty/The Secret World of Arrietty”, it was customized inside the company, and evolved to become more usable according to its production style. 

Official Website:
https://opentoonz.github.io/e/

Ouch

Ouch helps creators who don’t draw overcome the lack of quality graphics. Download free for a link. 

Official Website:
https://icons8.com/ouch

Pencil 2D

Beginner-friendly Animation Tool

Pencil 2D is a free and open-source animation design software for beginners. This software can introduce you to the ropes of 2D animation. Its minimalist user interface has all the essential tools for beginners.

Official Website:
http://www.pencil2d.org/

TupiTube

TupiTube is a free 2D animation software.  There is 2 version: an Android app for basic frame by frame animation, and a desktop app available in Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting several animation technique  like Cut-Out, Stop Motion, and Rotoscoping.
 

Notable Features: Multi-platform; In-App Tutorials

Official Website:
https://www.maefloresta.com/

Upwork

Upwork is a melting pot for twelve million digital freelancers and five million employers as of writing this guide. The jobs are spread out across 12 fields and hundreds of sub-fields. Upwork charges 5% – 20% of commission fees so make sure to factor that into your budget.

Official Website:
https://www.upwork.com/

Vimeo

Vimeo is a video hosting platform. The clean layout and ad-free design is well-loved in the video community.

In 2017, they launched a video review tool. So far, their feature hasn’t been able to match  other video review tool like Frame.io or Filestage. 

Official Website:
https://vimeo.com/

Vectr

Vector-based cloud freeware​

Vectr is a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. You can create 2D vector graphics available both as a web app (preferably Chrome). It has the core features you’d hope and is versatile enough for day-to-day design tasks.

Official Website:
https://vectr.com/

If you’ve got a suggestion for a tool, you can submit it here.

If you want to use any of the function, here’s the Elementor page code here and search function code here. Feel free to use and link it back here.

Huge thanks to Jefri, Ameen, Joel, Pam, Reynard, Yugene, Erina and Raul. 

About the Author

Bryan Victor

Bryan Victor

Bryan Victor (@bryanvictor_l) is a interviewer, writer and founder of bryanvictor.com. He is fascinated with design, useable psychology and philosophy.

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Comments – 0 Responses

21 Responses

  1. This is a wonderful list that can help so many people! Thanks for creating it, Bryan!

  2. It’s amazing how you have included so many resources in one place!

  3. We have Never heard of half of these, Time to Dig in!
    Really appreciate this Bryan
    P.s We may have a couple of suggestions for the list, how can we get these to You?
    – Vebu Animation

  4. This is a collections of great info presented in such an ideal way. I’ve a presentation next week, and I think this might help in that

  5. Good List!

    Adobe Character Animator is missing!

    This is a great and intuitive tool that allows non-professional animators to create character animations.

    I have some free puppets for the software to start experimenting with: https://www.animationguides.com/ The software is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud and there is also an option to get a free performer mode version that works with premade puppets. I have it all explained on the website.