Is there a free After Effects alternative?

Yes, EffectCraft is a free, open-source motion graphics and compositing tool from the same ArtCraft team that makes PhotoCraft, and they measure it against After Effects. According to its GitHub page, you get the panels you'd expect, like Project, Composition, Timeline, Effect Controls and the Render Queue, plus layers of every kind, keyframes with a Graph Editor, shape layers, masks, and Lottie import and export built in, so an animation can go straight onto a website.

So here's the catch, and they say it themselves: its first commit was on October 1, 2026, it's in alpha, and it isn't recommended for production client work yet. It can't open After Effects projects or run After Effects plug-ins, and macOS is the most tested platform, so Windows and Linux users have hit basic bugs. If it was me, I'd play with it on a throwaway project and keep using whatever you deliver real work in for now. Every menu action is also a command an agent can drive, same as PhotoCraft. My guide to the free ArtCraft apps and Claude Code has the official download links and how to check a download is the real file.