Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Animate.css VS Shoelace.css

Compare Animate.css VS Shoelace.css and see what are their differences

Animate.css logo Animate.css

Animate.css is a cross-browser library of CSS animations.

Shoelace.css logo Shoelace.css

A back to the basics CSS starter kit.
  • Animate.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-06
  • Shoelace.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-03

Animate.css features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Animate.css provides a wide range of preset animations that can be easily implemented by adding class names to HTML elements. This eliminates the need for custom CSS animations or JavaScript, thus saving time and effort.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    The animations in Animate.css work across all modern browsers, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience for users regardless of the browser they use.
  • Open Source
    Animate.css is an open-source library, meaning it's free to use and contributions from the community help keep it updated and improve its functionality over time.
  • Lightweight
    The library is relatively lightweight, especially if you only include the specific animations you need, which helps keep page load times low.
  • Customizable
    Although it comes with a wide range of preset animations, Animate.css allows for customization. Developers can easily modify the CSS to fit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Animate.css

  • Limited to CSS Animations
    Animate.css only includes CSS-based animations. For more complex interactions or animations that require JavaScript, another library or custom code would be necessary.
  • Overhead for Unused Animations
    By importing the entire library, you might include many animations that are not used, leading to unnecessary overhead. Selective imports or custom builds are required to avoid this.
  • Performance
    Frequent or complex animations can lead to performance issues, especially on lower-end devices. Developers need to be mindful of how often animations are triggered and their impact on performance.
  • Limited Control
    Using pre-defined animations means less control over specific nuances of the animations. For more intricate or highly customized animations, a more flexible solution may be needed.
  • Potential Conflicts
    There can be potential conflicts with existing CSS in your project, especially if the same class names are used, leading to unintended side effects.

Shoelace.css features and specs

  • Customizable
    Shoelace.css is built using modern Web Components, allowing for easy customization and theming with CSS Variables, ensuring that developers can tailor components to their specific needs.
  • Compatibility
    Shoelace.css is designed to be framework-agnostic and works seamlessly with various JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, providing flexibility in integration.
  • Responsive Design
    The library provides components that are inherently responsive, which helps in building applications that look good on both desktop and mobile devices without additional effort.
  • Accessibility
    Components in Shoelace.css are designed with accessibility in mind, ensuring that applications are usable by people with disabilities and compliant with accessibility standards.
  • Modern Standards
    Being based on Web Components, Shoelace.css makes use of modern web standards, which promotes future-proofing and compatibility with upcoming web technologies.

Possible disadvantages of Shoelace.css

  • Size
    As a component library, Shoelace.css might introduce additional size to your project, which can be a concern for applications where performance and load times are critical.
  • Browser Support
    Since it uses Web Components, Shoelace.css may require polyfills for older browsers that do not fully support these technologies, potentially increasing the complexity of deployments.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers unfamiliar with Web Components or the concept of using framework-agnostic components might need some time to understand and effectively use Shoelace.css.
  • Community and Support
    Compared to more established component libraries, Shoelace.css might have a smaller community and fewer third-party resources, which could make finding support and solutions to issues more challenging.
  • Limited Built-in Functionality
    While highly customizable, Shoelace.css might lack some of the advanced, built-in functionalities found in larger, more comprehensive UI frameworks.

Analysis of Animate.css

Overall verdict

  • Animate.css is generally considered a good tool for adding animations to web projects. It is reliable, simple to use, and widely supported by the development community. However, for highly customized animations or when trying to minimize the performance footprint, custom solutions may be more appropriate.

Why this product is good

  • Animate.css is a well-known library for CSS animations. It is widely used due to its ease of integration, comprehensive collection of animations, and minimal overhead. It allows developers to quickly incorporate animations into their projects without having to write complex CSS from scratch.

Recommended for

  • Web developers looking for quick, easy-to-use animation solutions.
  • Projects that need standard animations with minimal setup.
  • Developers who prefer using established libraries with active community support.
  • Designers who want to add basic animations without deep CSS knowledge.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Animate.css and Shoelace.css)
Design Tools
67 67%
33% 33
Developer Tools
60 60%
40% 40
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
Gradient Generator
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Animate.css and Shoelace.css. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Shoelace.css seems to be a lot more popular than Animate.css. While we know about 25 links to Shoelace.css, we've tracked only 1 mention of Animate.css. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Animate.css mentions (1)

  • 3 Easy Ways to Add Animation to your Angular Applications
    An advantage of this approach is that it lets us utilize any CSS animation library that works off of the same concept of adding and removing classes. Some of the more popular libraries that work this way are animate.css and magic.css. Chris Coyier has an amazing article on CSS Tricks that lists more of these if you are interested. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

Shoelace.css mentions (25)

  • Show HN: Cs16.css – CSS library based on CS 1.6 UI
    Dashboards, tabs, trees, ... Usually require at least some JavaScript to work properly. For some components, you may be able to use hacks around that. But I would generally not recommend that outside of experimentation. So a pure CSS framework is not going to work. It seems that you are not using a frontend framework like Vue.js. So I would recommend a library using web components for the interactivity. One good... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • React v19 has been released
    Can webcomponents be trivially used with HTMX? Like for example: https://shoelace.style/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Do You Need to SSR Your Web Components?
    I created a simple example with a bunch of Shoelace components where they are being lazy-loaded from a CDN. I loaded the components this way to show worst-case-scenario loading performance. As you can see, it still loads quite quickly. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • You Should Be Shipping a Manifest with Your Web Components
    A recent example of this was when I was helping a team get up and running with Shoelace in a Next.js application. Shoelace provides react wrappers, but they were throwing an error when Next.js tried to server-side render them. Fortunately, Shoelace ships their CEM, so I was able to use it to generate new wrappers that were SSR-safe. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Web Components Are Okay
    I've yet to see this go wrong in practice. The kinds of components that are worth publishing as web components are often large, non-trivial components. Eg media libraries, emoji pickers (like the one made by this article's author), chatbox interfaces, and so on. They are the kinds of things you only have a limited number of on your page. If a component is small and focused in scope, it's likely either written in... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Animate.css and Shoelace.css, you can also consider the following products

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.

CSSGradient.io - As a free css gradient generator tool, this website lets you create a colorful gradient background for your website, blog, or social media profile.