EffectCraft Review (2026): Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

EffectCraft is the After Effects member of ArtCraft's seven Craft apps, a layer-based compositor for motion graphics and visual effects written from scratch in Rust and released in early October 2026. Its README calls it "an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe After Effects" built from Adobe's public documentation and observed behaviour, never from Adobe's files, icons, presets or code. The repository had 6,395 GitHub stars on 14 October 2026, and version 0.9.2 shipped on 12 October. The README says "EffectCraft is in alpha" and that it "isn't yet a replacement for After Effects on client work".

The feature list reads as After Effects' own: compositions, layers, keyframes, expressions, layer styles, 3D cameras and lights, shape layers, text with animators, masks, puppet tools, time remapping and a Graph Editor. The headline claim is 306 effects that cover "every one of After Effects' 298, and more". The project puts itself at about 91% of After Effects' features and "about 45% of the way to replacing After Effects for professional work", which is the usual Craft-app gap between a feature existing and behaving as Adobe's does.

Two tools download models on demand: Roto Brush can use MobileSAM, a 40 MB download, and face tracking can use Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker, 3.8 MB, with the README noting neither has been compared with After Effects yet. Projects save as versioned JSON in .ecproj files; After Effects .aep and .aepx projects cannot be opened and After Effects plug-ins do not run. Lottie import and export are built in, in .json and .lottie form, which matters for web and app animation.

Codecs are pure Rust with no FFmpeg. The Render Queue exports H.264 MP4, ProRes MOV, HEVC, AV1 MP4, WebM with VP9 or AV1, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and EXR sequences, animated GIF and WAV or AIFF audio. Native builds exist for macOS, Windows and Linux plus a FreeBSD tarball and a browser build, but the README says macOS is the most tested platform and that Linux and Windows users have hit basic interaction bugs being fixed first. No independent hands-on test had been published by 14 October 2026; Creative Bloq's review of the suite did not include EffectCraft.

How it was built, and how to read the numbers. ArtCraft's founder Brandon Thomas, formerly CEO of Storyteller.ai, says the Craft apps were written in Rust with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 as clean-room reimplementations from public documentation, with no Adobe code, icons or presets. The parity percentages quoted above are the project's own, measured by its team against Adobe's documentation; no outside party has verified them, and the project itself distinguishes between a feature that exists and one that behaves like Adobe's. We have not installed the app. Download only from github.com/storytold or getartcraft.com, because lookalike download sites appeared within days of launch. ArtCraft's paid plans, from $8 a month billed yearly, buy generative credits for the company's separate AI studio and are not needed to run any Craft app.