A lot of object-show animators drew their first frame in FlipaClip. So when people search for a “FlipaClip alternative,” they usually aren’t running away from it. They’ve just hit its ceiling. This page is an honest look at where FlipaClip shines, where it stops, and what we built at Inanimator for the moment you outgrow it. (New to object shows? Start with the full guide.)
What FlipaClip genuinely gets right
FlipaClip is where a huge number of object-show animators started, and that is not a small thing. It’s free to start (freemium), lives on your phone or tablet, and gets you to “I made a thing that moves” in minutes. The frame-by-frame workflow is intuitive: draw a frame, add a frame, turn on onion skinning, repeat. Layers, audio, and export are all there. The community around it is enormous, and the tutorials are everywhere.
For a first object show — a couple of characters, a simple gag, twenty or thirty frames — FlipaClip is genuinely a great ramp. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. The best tool is often the one that gets you to actually start, and for a lot of people that tool is FlipaClip.
Where FlipaClip stops
It’s frame-by-frame only. There is no rigging and no tweening. Every frame is hand-drawn, which is honest and beautiful but slow for a multi-character, multi-episode series where you want to re-use a walk cycle or a blink.
And the community has documented the rough edges: playback lag and skipped frames past roughly 60 frames, and crashes on heavy projects. A real object-show episode runs well past 60 frames. So the ceiling isn’t theoretical. It’s a number you bump into on episode one.
What Inanimator does differently
Inanimator is a browser studio. Open a tab on a phone, tablet, or computer; your projects and asset library sync through your cloud account.
The workflow is object-show-native. You draw parts — bodies, eyes, mouths, arms, legs — with brushes, fill, shapes, and layers, and store them in a global, searchable asset library with sections. Save a character as a rig and re-pose it across episodes. A default library of original parts ships with it, so you can animate before you’ve drawn anything.
Two animation modes work together: frame-by-frame with onion skinning and a filmstrip, and rig posing with math-based tweening. The tweening is plain mathematical interpolation: keyframes are solid, tweened frames are ghosted, so you always see what you drew versus what the math filled in. You keep the hand-drawn feel of FlipaClip where you want it, and you let the rig carry the repetition where you don’t. Export is MP4 at 1080p at your chosen framerate.
On the roadmap: an in-app script writer with karaoke line highlighting, per-line voice recording with takes, lip-sync modes, multi-track audio, a thumbnail maker, camera pan/zoom, parallax backgrounds, and native mobile apps.
Two pledges. The 100% generative-AI-free pledge: no AI-generated art, ever, signed in marker on the homepage. Tweening is math, not AI. And Inanimator is free during beta, with beta members locking the Founding Creator price for life. Pricing isn’t announced beyond that.
Side by side
| FlipaClip | Inanimator | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free / freemium | Free during beta; Founding price locked for beta members |
| Platforms | iOS and Android | Browser on phones, tablets, computers |
| Rigging / tweening | Frame-by-frame only; no rigs, no tweening | Parts + saved rigs; math-based tweening |
| Object-show workflow fit | Great first ramp; parts managed by hand | Native searchable parts library, rigs, default parts |
| Development status | Active (mobile app) | In closed beta, actively developed |
| AI policy | No public pledge | 100% generative-AI-free pledge |
Who should stick with FlipaClip
If you’re making short, hand-drawn pieces and you love drawing every frame, FlipaClip is doing its job and there’s no reason to leave. It’s especially strong as a first tool — the thing you open the day you decide you want to animate. If your episodes stay short, your frame counts stay low, and you’re happy drawing everything by hand, you’ll keep having fun, and you should.
Inanimator is the better fit when you start feeling the ceiling: episodes getting longer than about 60 frames; re-drawing the same character for the hundredth time; wanting a rig you can pose instead of re-draw; or wanting to move between a phone, a tablet, and a computer without copying files.
Join the beta
If you’ve hit FlipaClip’s ceiling and you want rigs, tweening, and the rest of the object-show pipeline in the browser, join the beta at /beta.