Adobe Animate is frozen. Rive is what Flash should've become.

Update, October 2026: Rive now imports Flash and Animate files. Drag an .fla file (Animate CC or later) or a zipped XFL folder into a project and it converts to a Rive file: symbols become artboards, frame labels become State Machine states, frame scripts become transitions, and buttons, tweens, and frame sounds carry over. Read the release notes.

Flash started as FutureSplash Animator in 1996, became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash Professional. In 2016, Adobe renamed it Animate, distancing from the "Flash" brand after years of security issues and Steve Jobs' controversial letter, Thoughts on Flash. When Flash Player was killed in December 2020, Animate survived as the authoring tool, exporting to HTML5 instead of SWF. TV animators, gamedevs, and web creators kept using it. Now even that is ending. Adobe just put Animate into maintenance mode. Bug fixes only, no new features. The software has been coasting for years. They just finally said it out loud. The community had been complaining for years that Adobe was neglecting it. The Feb 2026 announcement just made it official.

So what are the alternatives?

If you've been following the conversation online, you've probably seen the same lists. Toon Boom, Moho, Blender, Krita, OpenToonz. Those are all fine tools. But they're answering a different question than the one I think matters most.

"What's the best 2D animation software now?" is a fair question. The one I care about is "what replaces the thing Animate/Flash actually was?"

Most alternatives miss the point

Animate was more than animation software. It was Flash. The tool where designers learned to code and developers learned to animate. One environment, no silos. You could build interactive content that shipped, with rich animation and code-driven logic. What you made in the tool was the actual product that shipped.

Toon Boom is for TV animation pipelines. Moho is for character rigging. Blender is a 3D suite with a 2D mode bolted on. These are great at what they do, but none of them are trying to be what Flash was.

If all you need is frame-by-frame animation for video output, those tools will serve you well. But if you're building interactive content (UI animations, stateful experiences, things that respond to user input and live data) that's a different problem entirely.

What Flash actually got right

Flash's fundamental concept was ahead of its time. The authoring tool and the runtime were the same thing. You were building the real, shippable thing, with no video export or redlines to hand off and hope it matched. Design, animation, and code lived in the same environment.

Designers could write code and developers could push pixels. The line between the two was blurry, and that was the point. The tools that silo people into "designer" or "developer" are the problem, not some fundamental difference in how creative people think. Flash proved it: it turned designers, animators, and coders into renaissance people who did all three instead of staying in one lane.

That creative freedom was unmatched. Nothing since has come close.

We built Rive to bring it back

Flash is the reason we started building Rive in the first place. It's where I learned to animate and code. A lot of our core team actually worked on Flash; you’ll still find our names in the Animate credits. So this is an insider's take. We lived inside that tool for decades, and we've spent the time since rebuilding what made it great.

Here's what Phil Chung on our team says about it:

I first downloaded a trial version of Macromedia Flash 3 in 1998 and little did I realize at the time that it would shape the course of my life for the next 27 years. I owe a lot of the success in my career to this piece of software that evolved over the years to become such a central part of the web, games, and video. Though I’d moved on to other platforms over the years, I joined the team at Rive because we shared the same goal of building not just a platform, but a community that would allow people to share their creativity in the same way Flash did.

It’s pretty special to have the opportunity to give Flash files a way to “live on” in an editor and modern runtime that we’re continually trying to improve for our users whether designers, coders, animators or artists. I hope Rive can give others everything Flash gave me and more.

Rive already has solved the hard tech behind a modern Flash:

• Design, animation, code all in one place

• Agent-native. Your coding agent builds and edits Rive files with the Rive CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), and you shape the same file by hand in the Editor, going back and forth as much as you want.

• Scripting in AnimaScript or Luau. AnimaScript is the newer language: TypeScript syntax, compiled to WebAssembly in a few hundred milliseconds, and it runs in every Rive runtime. In Rive's benchmarks it ran about 8.7 times faster than Luau on mesh decoding. Luau scripts keep working too (read why we chose Luau). Write logic directly in your Rive files. Combine that with Data Binding, and you can build fully interactive, data-driven experiences without leaving the editor.

• Open-source native runtimes for web, iOS, Android, Flutter, Unity, Unreal, Defold, React Native, C++, and more. Rive runs everywhere, from the browser to consoles, smart TVs, and cars. No plugins. Rive's runtimes get packaged directly into your app.

• Custom open-source renderer to GPU-accelerate vector graphics (hard problem, check out this game we built to demonstrate the performance on an iPhone)

• Complex international text support

• Performant realtime glows/shadows

• Bones and mesh deformations

• Tiny files. Rive's binary format produces files typically 10-15x smaller than equivalent Lottie JSON and 50x+ smaller than video.

• …and a bunch of other stuff like responsive layouts, inverse kinematics, N-Slicing, and more (check out our full features page)

What we’re still working on:

• Text input fields (live now in the Editor, on the web, and in Flutter and Unreal, with more runtimes coming; check feature support for your runtime)

• Accessibility (shipped: screen reader Semantics on web, iOS, Android, and Flutter, plus keyboard Focus on web, see the docs)

• An FLA importer (shipped in October 2026, see the release notes)

• Direct frame-by-frame drawing (we have Solos but the use case is a bit different)

• A Flash-like brush tool (shipped as the Pencil, Brush, and Eraser tools. Scripting also lets you extend the editor to build new tools… which work at runtime too, as well as at edit time)

Who's using it

Spotify Wrapped launched their experience with Rive (as did LinkedIn Year in Review). At the end of 2025, Rive went out to ~1.7B end users, and products built with Rive now reach over 2 billion. Duolingo builds entire interactive experiences with Rive (lip-synced characters, UI components, Video Call with Lily, their chess app, and more). Disney, Riot Games, Notion, and hundreds of others ship with Rive across platforms. These are stateful, interactive, data-driven pieces of the product, well past animated micro-interactions.

The transition from Animate

If you're coming from Animate or After Effects, the timeline and keyframing will feel familiar. The biggest shift is the State Machine and Data Binding. It's a more powerful model for anything interactive, but it does have a learning curve. Our docs and YouTube channel are the best spots to get started. To bring existing work over, drag your .fla file into Rive and it converts (how it works).

How concepts translate:

• .swf → .riv

• .fla → .rev

• Flash Player → Rive Runtime (open-source native library that gets packaged directly into your app, no plugin)

• Flash Scenes → Rive Artboards

• Flash MovieClips → Rive Components

• Flash frame labels + gotoAndPlay → Rive State Machines

• ActionScript → Rive Scripting (AnimaScript or Luau)

• Flash's Library panel → Rive's Asset panel

• Flash Bone tool → Rive Bones

• Flash Runtime Armature → All Rive Bones and Constraints can be dynamically interacted with (or manipulated by data) at runtime

• Flash IK (default bone behavior) → Rive IK Constraints (opt-in per bone)

• Animate Asset Warp (Modern Rigging) → Rive mesh deformation (raster) + vertex binding (vector)

Try it out and let us know your feedback. We ship fast and are adding features weekly. This is the tool we've wanted for years, and our whole team is motivated to get things right.