Rive and Lottie both put motion on a website or in an app. They are not interchangeable. One is closer to a small interactive product. The other is closer to a lightweight, timeline-based clip. Choosing the wrong one usually shows up as a janky landing page or a file nobody on the product team wants to maintain.
Lottie, in practice
Lottie is a good fit when the motion is short, mostly linear, and needs to ship as a small file: a success check, a loader, an icon that plays once. Designers can export from After Effects. Engineers know the players. For many app motion moments, Lottie is enough — and enough is the point.
It is weaker when you need states, inputs, or a piece that should listen to the UI. You end up stitching clips together, or pretending a timeline is a state machine.
Rive, in practice
Rive is built for interaction. State machines, inputs, and runtime control mean an icon can hover, complete, fail, and idle without swapping files. That is why the Bazaar icon system lives in Rive: the art had to ship in product UI and respond, not just decorate a page.
Rive asks more of the design-and-dev handshake. Someone has to own the runtime. If the motion will only play once on scroll and never again, that extra surface area is wasted.
How we choose on a brief
- One-shot, decorative, or marketing-loop motion: start with Lottie — or a video if it does not need to be vector-crisp.
- UI that has to react (hover, progress, empty states, branded icons in product): start with Rive.
- A marketing site that should demonstrate the product: often Rive on a few hero moments, not a page full of embeds. See interactive web animation.
- A SaaS onboarding flow: mix. Explain with video or 2D; confirm actions with Lottie or Rive micro-interactions. More on that in SaaS onboarding animation.
We do not drop a cold Rive embed on a homepage and call it a case study. Interactive work should be on demand, gated, and honest about performance. If you are deciding between the two for a launch, bring the surface (web, iOS, Android) and the interaction list to a consultation. We will tell you which runtime we would actually build.
For the broader product story around software teams, see SaaS & startups and the work index.