Free GSAP for Everyone? Sort of…

Recently, everyone’s been buzzing about how GSAP is now completely free. But I saw a post on Threads claiming it's only free to use with Webflow and WordPress — which made me pause and look into it further.

What is GSAP?

GSAP is a powerful JavaScript library for creating smooth, high-performance animations on web pages. You can use it to animate CSS properties, SVG, canvas, scrolling, and more. It supports timelines, Bezier curves, pauses, reverse playback, and a lot of other features.

Background

I’ve been using GSAP for a while now and really enjoy working with it. I’ve also explored a few alternatives, which I’ll mention later. So when I heard there might be restrictions, I was definitely curious to dig deeper.

Turns out, it’s not as bad as I thought. Here’s what I did to test if I could still use the library:

1. Created a blank React project;
2. Installed the library using two commands in the terminal:
   npm install gsap and npm install @gsap/react;
3. Used the library in the usual way:

import { useRef } from 'react';
import gsap from 'gsap';
import { useGSAP } from '@gsap/react';

gsap.registerPlugin(useGSAP);

export default function App() {
  const container = useRef();

  useGSAP(() => {
    gsap.to('.box', { rotation: 180 });
  }, { scope: container });

  return (
    <div ref={container} className="app">
      <div className="box">Hello</div>
    </div>
  );
}

Everything works just like it used to 🎉

Is GSAP really free?

GSAP is now restricted from being used in certain no-code site builders. You can still use the code itself, as shown above. But if you’re trying to integrate it through a visual editor so users can create animations visually — that’s now ONLY allowed in Webflow.

GSAP Alternatives

◾️ Anime.js
◾️ Motion