Free Flow alternatives for easing in After Effects

Flow is the panel most motion designers reach for when the Graph Editor gets tedious. You pick a curve, select your keyframes and click once. It costs $35 on aescripts, and for a lot of people that is money well spent.

You don't need it to get good easing, though. After Effects can do custom curves on its own, there is a pay-what-you-want script, and MotionUI includes a curve editor in its free plan. Here is what each option does, what it can't do, and which one fits your work.

The short answer

• You ease a few keyframes a day: the Graph Editor and Keyframe Velocity are built in and free.

• You want bounce and elastic curves: Ease and Wizz does them with expressions, and you can name your own price.

• You want a Flow-style panel with presets for free: MotionUI's free plan has more than 30 named curves, a drag editor and cubic-bezier input, on Mac and Windows.

• You want a full toolkit and don't mind a subscription: Motion Studio by Mt. Mograph, from $11 a month on the yearly plan.

What Flow does, so you know what to replace

Flow is made by renderTom and Zack Lovatt. It shows a cubic-bezier curve you can drag, ships with 25 preset curves based on Robert Penner's easing functions, and lets you save your own. Select keyframes, click a curve, done. There is a free trial on aescripts, and a license costs $35.

So a replacement needs three things: presets you can reuse, a curve you can see and drag, and one click to apply it to many keyframes at once. Keep that list in mind for the options below.

1. Graph Editor and Keyframe Velocity: free and built in

Every After Effects license already has an easing tool. It is slower to use, but it can do most of what you need.

1. Select your keyframes and press F9 for Easy Ease. Shift+F9 eases only the incoming side, Cmd+Shift+F9 (Ctrl+Shift+F9 on Windows) only the outgoing side.

2. Open the Graph Editor with Shift+F3 and switch to the speed graph. Pull the handles out to make the ease stronger.

3. For exact numbers, open Animation > Keyframe Velocity (Cmd+Shift+K or Ctrl+Shift+K) and type the influence. Easy Ease uses 33.33%. Values around 70 to 90% give the soft, confident feel you see in product videos.

The catch: there are no presets. Every curve is set by hand, property by property, and copying a curve from one project to the next means writing the numbers down. Fine for a short job, tiring for a 60-layer product demo.

2. Ease and Wizz: name your own price

Ease and Wizz by Ian Haigh is a script on aescripts that you can download for any amount, including nothing. Instead of changing your keyframes, it adds an expression to the property. That expression moves the value between your keyframes along one of Robert Penner's curves, including elastic, bounce and back.

This is its real strength. A bounce or an elastic wobble between two keyframes is hard to build by hand in the Graph Editor, and Ease and Wizz makes it one click.

The trade-off is that the curve now lives in an expression. The Graph Editor no longer shows what you see on screen, and changing the feel later means applying the script again rather than dragging a handle. Teammates who open the project will find expressions on your layers instead of plain keyframes.

3. MotionUI: a curve editor in the free plan

MotionUI is a panel for After Effects built for UI and product animation. Its Easing section is part of the free plan and works much like Flow:

• More than 30 named curves: sine, quad, cubic, quart, quint, expo, circ and back, each as in, out and in-out, plus Swing In, Swing Out and Wave.

• A curve you can drag, or four numbers you can type as a cubic-bezier. That is the same format CSS uses and the one Figma shows for a custom bezier in prototypes. If a developer or designer hands you cubic-bezier(0.22, 1, 0.36, 1), you can use it as is.

• Apply Easing to Keys sets the curve on every selected keyframe, across layers and properties.

• Keep influence keeps the handle length of your keys and only changes the shape. Turn it off to get the exact preset curve.

• Swing Through handles chains of three or more keys, for example a card that flies in, pauses and flies on. The layer slows down at the keys in between without stopping, and the Flow slider decides how much: 0 stops, 15 keeps a gentle drift, 40 barely slows down.

MotionUI writes regular keyframe easing, no expressions. The project opens and renders on a computer without MotionUI, and the curves show up in the Graph Editor like any other ease.

The free plan also includes the basic Animate presets (fade, four slides, pop, scale in and trim path), the rectangle rigs and two text effects, one of them a typewriter effect. The Figma import, Proximity, Matchcut and the AI tools are part of MotionUI Pro at $19 a month or $168 a year. MotionUI runs on macOS and Windows.

4. Motion Studio by Mt. Mograph: the paid toolkit

Motion Studio is the successor to Motion 4. Its Easing extension edits speed and influence without the Graph Editor, shows cubic, speed and influence graphs, and keeps your curves in palettes you can sort into folders. You also get the rest of the Motion toolkit for After Effects and Illustrator.

It is a subscription: $13 a month, or $11 a month billed yearly ($132). There is a 7-day trial with no credit card. Mt. Mograph no longer sells lifetime licenses, though older Motion 2, 3 and 4 licenses keep working.

Which one should you use?

• Occasional easing, no extra tools: the Graph Editor and Keyframe Velocity.

• Bounces, elastic overshoots, character work: Ease and Wizz.

• UI and product animation, curves from CSS or Figma, presets without paying: MotionUI.

• You already like Flow and only want the same thing: buy Flow. $35 once is fair for a tool you use every day.

How to apply a CSS or Figma curve in After Effects with MotionUI

1. Install MotionUI and open the panel in After Effects under Window > Extensions > MotionUI.

2. In the timeline, select the keyframes you want to ease. Selecting the layer alone is not enough.

3. In the Animate tab, open Easing. Pick a preset, drag the handles, or type the four cubic-bezier numbers.

4. Click Apply Easing to Keys and preview.

5. For a chain of keys that should feel like one move, select all of them, pick the Swing Through tile next to the curves, set Flow and click Swing Through.

Tips that matter more than the plugin

• Fix the timing first. If a move feels slow, the keyframes are probably too far apart. A stronger curve won't save it. There is more on this in how to make UI animation feel smoother.

• Ease out on the way in, ease in on the way out. Things that arrive should land softly. Things that leave can accelerate away.

• Use one curve per scene. When every card uses the same ease, the video feels designed. Mixing five curves feels random.

• Stagger instead of slowing down. Several layers moving at once look heavy. Offsetting them by a few frames reads better, see how to stagger UI card animations.

Frequently asked questions

Is Flow for After Effects free?

No. Flow costs $35 on aescripts and has a free trial. Free alternatives are the Graph Editor built into After Effects, Ease and Wizz (name your own price) and the easing tools in MotionUI's free plan.

Can After Effects use cubic-bezier values from CSS?

Not directly. After Effects stores easing as speed and influence per keyframe, not as four bezier numbers. Tools like Flow and MotionUI convert a cubic-bezier into those values for you.

Will my project open on a computer without the plugin?

With MotionUI, yes. It writes normal keyframe easing, which After Effects saves in the project like any ease you set by hand. If a tool works with expressions instead, check that they still evaluate for whoever opens the project.

Does MotionUI's easing work on Windows?

Yes. MotionUI runs on macOS and on Windows, and the easing tools are part of the free plan on both.

Try the curves on your own keyframes: get started with MotionUI for free.