Adobe After Effects vs. Blender

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects

282 Reviews and Ratings

Blender

Blender

94 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Adobe After Effects	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Adobe After Effects allows users to create cinematic movie titles, intros, and transitions, remove an object from a clip, start a fire or make it rain, or animate a logo or character. The vendor states that with After Effects, users can apply motion-graphics and animation to any digital object.	$20.99 Per User Per Month
Blender	Score 9.2 out of 10	N/A	Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite available in under the GNU General Public License. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Blender Cloud is a related service accessible via subscription, and is a training and content platform providing access to expertise from the Blender Institute for advancing one's use of Blender.	$11.50 per month

Pricing

Adobe After Effects

Blender

Editions & Modules

Annual Plan (Paid Monthly): $20.99
Per User Per Month
Monthly Plan: $31.49
Per User Per Month
Annual Plan (Prepaid): $239.88
Per User Per Year

Blender Cloud Membership: $11.50
per month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Adobe After Effects	Blender
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Adobe After Effects	Blender
Considered Both Products	Adobe After Effects Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects Adobe After Effects stands out for its comprehensive set of tools for creating motion graphics, visual effects, and animations. Its seamless integration with other Adobe software, vast community, and extensive tutorials make it user-friendly. It offers a wide range of 2D and 3D … Incentivized Helpful? AR Alexander Ross-Edwards Motion Designer Chose Adobe After Effects Adobe After Effects is a great bridge from still graphics and vector, to motion graphics. The integration with Premiere makes things work seamlessly and the way it can ustilise native PSDs and ai files makes working in Adobe After Effects ideal for most clients. Incentivized Helpful? Hannan Shahid Sales Team Lead Chose Adobe After Effects The other tools we use are part of the Adobe CC Family and they complement each other very well. We chose Adobe After Effects because it is far superior in terms of functionality and output to any other application in the market and it met our design needs perfectly well. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects In Adobe After we can do Motion Graphics, 2d Animation, Text Animation, 3d Animation, Video Editing, Chroma Key Cutting, Visual Effects, Color grading, Motion Tracking all this can be done in After Effects only, and I have been using this software quite a while so it's a … Incentivized Helpful? Miko Mikaela Garcia Graphics Video Editor Specialist Chose Adobe After Effects A lot more features and support through Adobe with After Effects Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects I have used Adobe Premiere Pro, Camtasia, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Apple Keynote. All of these programs allow you to do some level of animation. However, Adobe After Effects is specifically designed to create advanced and dynamic effects and animations for video. Though you … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects Adobe After Effects is available for both windows and macOS with no software level performance degradation. Final cut pro is available only for Mac os on apple devices which let's file sharing between windows difficult. File sizes also vary for same level of editing. After … Incentivized Helpful? LA Laila Abouizza Backend Developer Chose Adobe After Effects Before switching to Adobe After Effects we were using Camtasia Studio to edit videos and it's a great video editing software but it couldn't provide us with the complex video effects that we needed to implement for our videos so we switched it to After Effects for that purpose. Incentivized Helpful? Romi Kalathiya App/Game Designer \| UI/UX & Prototype Expert \| Motion Graphics \| Video Editor \| GIF \| JSON Chose Adobe After Effects [Adobe After Effects] is a beast and Vegas pro is just a baby when compared to Adobe. It doesn't match [Adobe After Effects] when it comes to the feature and performance it offers. Incentivized Helpful? IS Isabel Sam Owner Chose Adobe After Effects Photoshop is good for simple video editing, but it doesn't have animation or audio help and it takes a while to get your video put together in a way that looks good. iMovie is also just for simpler video editing and lacks the extras that After Effects have that really turn your … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects We use these tools in conjunction with After Effects not as a replacement. Apple Motion does many of the same things as After Effects and in some ways is more intuitive. However, After Effects is bundled with software we absolutely must use and is the industry standard. New … Incentivized Helpful? Nathan Morimitsu Social Media and Marketing Adminstrator Chose Adobe After Effects Because of our use of other Adobe products, and how they all play well together, we never really looked at using any other product. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects It is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud that I sign monthly and is full of possibilities. Most of them I've not yet explored. Adobe has a large library of tutorials and we can find a huge number of tutorials on YouTube for free to teach how to use it better or find some plugins … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects I find Adobe After Effects to be superior to iMovie and Final Cut Pro in that I am able to do much more with the software. It isn't as limiting as the other two. I also like that it isn't an Apple product. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Apple. There is a bigger learning … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects iMovie motion graphics limitations are just that, limitations. Motion Graphics in [Adobe] After Effects are very easy. [Adobe] After Effects opens many more doors for typography, visuals, and 3D animations that are leaps and bounds cooler than anything you can do in iMovie. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro are quite similar in the sense of their functionalities as far as I'm aware and the interfaces are more or less similar. But Adobe After Effects is preferred over Final Cut Pro mostly because of the fact that it is part of the Adobe … Incentivized Helpful? RT Ryan Treleven Technology Trainer Chose Adobe After Effects I haven’t used any direct competitors. I’ve used plenty of other paid and free photo and video editing programs, but none as full featured and powerful as After Effects, which makes it a pretty simple choice to use and buy if you need something that can perform like it can! Incentivized Helpful? Salomi Rai Junior Animator Chose Adobe After Effects Compared to other software, Adobe After Effects is more useful for motion graphics and composition. Adobe After Effects is simpler and easier to use for video editing and adding effects. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects Adobe Illustrator is used for creating templates, logos, cartoons but you can animate the beautiful logo or cartoon with the help of a camera and 3D space, it worth the experience no matter what... Incentivized Helpful? ZL Zacheray Long Multimedia Specialist Chose Adobe After Effects After Effects is the halfway point between simple editing software like Premiere Pro and complex 3D suites like Cinema 4D. It offers a balance of speed and functionality for mid-level production. I also prefer it over Apple Motion and Black Magic Fusion, mostly due to being in … Incentivized Helpful? JZ John Zelayandia Content Specialist Chose Adobe After Effects After Effects is on par with most of these other non-Adobe software. It is able to edit, create, render, illustrate, stabilize video content; and so much more. Incentivized Helpful? ANDREW TOUTANT Sr. Designer / Art Direction Chose Adobe After Effects After Effects is more versatile for animations than Premiere for sure. And now, with the .mogrt templates, it can be great for keeping consistent animations and branding guides when sharing work with other animators and editors. I also like their 3d plugins and advanced … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Adobe After Effects We have taken After Effects because Adobe Animate is completely focused on animation rather than other things which After Effects can handle very easily, like we needed a program which can handle the professional animation, speed up our workflow, and can do various things like … Incentivized Helpful? FZ Fabio Zenoardo Media Creator Chose Adobe After Effects Obviously I use Premiere to edit and After Effects to post-produce. In the past I used 4D Cinema to create objects to insert in the videos, but now with a few external plugins all the objects you want are inserted. Incentivized Helpful? Bradley Gill co-founder Chose Adobe After Effects After Effects doesn't need to be compared directly with Premiere Pro. They should be looked at more like a pair. One is the right hand and one is the left. You can do things with either, but if you use them together you can do much much more. Using AE can help make your … Incentivized Helpful?	Blender CL Carlos Lopez Animation and VFX Engineer Chose Blender In addition to being free to use, Blender is competent and complete enough to do the same things as these programs. While some stabilization is still needed in some aspects, many of these They work quite well and practically the same as them. In addition, Blender has a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Most obvious answer for why we have chosen blender over others is cost. The cost of other software is too high but because blender is free it helps to put our money and resources in the right places. It also helped us to get quality output without additional cost as octane is … Incentivized Helpful? BG Benjamin Gwyn Senior Graphic Designer Chose Blender The 3D modelling methods are very different to other 3D software I've used. Incentivized Helpful? Gloria Varghese Digital marketing trainer Chose Blender Blender is a free software which makes it accessible by all.It also provides various features which is in the paid software also . Incentivized Helpful? Yaco Lioi Cofundador Chose Blender We selected Blender for most of use cases because it's availability and ease of use. Having no commitment in terms of plans or pricing also gives us more freedom to try it out, and we ended up staying with Blender. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Well, in fact, I haven't used any of that software, but there is one thing I know: Blender is free. That's huge for small business owners like me; it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. I have heard other people saying that the Autodesk offerings have … Incentivized Helpful? Arpad Szucs Brand Designer \| UI, UX & Visual Designer Chose Blender We used only Blender in a professional setting. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender It fulfills my expectation to make 3D animation and cartoons to show my concept of research results to the audiance ranging from low-level to excellent in the field. It saves a lot of time to explain and makes attraction to the audiance. It exceptionally helps my class room … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Again, Blender wins over its competition in the number of users and its large community because it is free software. Whether you like it or not, that's a kickstart that makes a noticeable difference. But, indeed, its competition is usually much more powerful and professional, … Incentivized Helpful? Jitendra Choubisa AR VR Content Developer Chose Blender Blender is first of all free and open source software. It has very easy to use tools which can help one in navigating and modifying easily and efficiently. It is also very less in size, on my system it is of 355 MB. The rendering engine Cycle works simultaneously in the … Incentivized Helpful? ME Matt Eddy Creative Director Chose Blender We've only used the consumer (non-pro) version of Sketchup, which we love, but is very limited in features and output capabilities compared to Blender. While Blender's learning curve is MUCH steeper than Sketchup, it feels like truly complete, professional design software. Incentivized Helpful? Zeel Pandya SAP ABAP Consultant Chose Blender As already mention , a Wide range of features and complete set of tools without paying anything . Suitable with any operating system. Getting started with Blender is also easy. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender I have to start off but stating the obvious. Blender is full-featured and free. Yes, I repeat, "free." Adobe makes outstanding products but at a high initial cost. Blender does a similarly fantastic job, but for free. Adobe Substance is able to perform all the tasks I need to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Ease of use and free, Zbrush has a very steep learning curve and Blender seems to be better at realistic image rendering. Plus free upgrades and amazing support made it a no-brainer. Lots of online tutorials and add-ons Blender comes out on top. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Blender is a more user-friendly version of these programs; not only that, but the community behind blender is great; posting everything you need on youtube or offering courses has made it so much easier to learn new ways to make renders or assets, also there are plenty of free … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Did not look at any others. This was recommended by an industry friend and has served our needs well. Incentivized Helpful? Mahmoud obaid Graduate Mechanical Engineer Chose Blender Again, Blender has a great advantage compared to other software which is being “ open source “ & free which can let anybody uses it without any worries. Compared to Ansys, Blender is ok since it doesn’t have all the features that Ansys got which is fine since Ansys is quite an … Incentivized Helpful? LH Liz Hogan Content Manager Chose Blender DaVinci resolve is also free to a point. They are [compatible]. However, you can mostly use it for video editing and graphic editing. Incentivized Helpful? DV Dominique Vilbrun Lead Designer Chose Blender The biggest advantage of Blender over these alternatives was how easy it was to learn, even for team members with no previous experience in 3D modeling, design, or any artistic field. The fact that it allows you to import or export files in most of the existing 3D model … Incentivized Helpful? Salomi Rai Junior Animator Chose Blender Every software has its own use. Despite being similar software, we use every software for different purposes. Personally, I use Blender for modeling and sculpting, Maya for animation, substance painter for texturing, and so on. So, my advice for you is that you should explore … Incentivized Helpful? Aniket Kumar Chaudhary Content Writer & Video Editor Chose Blender To date, Maya has been and is the undisputed leader in the sector. Despite being at such a high price, there is really no substitute for Maya's quality. Therefore, the use of Incentivized Helpful? DF Dominic Farrow Graphic Designer Chose Blender Adobe Animate doesn't do half of the things that Blender can. Blender is an all-around better program in the fact that it can 3D model, sculpt, and animate in real-time. Blender is also completely free and has tons of free resources available to everyone. I highly recommend … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Blender Blender is just as good as Cinema 4D. One huge advantage Blender has is that its free and you don't have to worry about upgrades or license upgrades when wanting to download or purchase the latest version Incentivized Helpful?

TrustRadius Insights
	Adobe After Effects	Blender
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published July 10, 2024 Adobe After Effects has often been used by professionals engaged in specialized video production and effects work. Users have shared that they use the software primarily for creating motion graphics, visual effects, and animations for various media including videos for social media, promotional content, and training materials. This suggests a marked preference for After Effects in tasks involving detailed video edits and complex animations that require a high level of customization and technical intricacies. Conversely, Blender users have mentioned utilizing the program primarily for its robust 3D modeling capabilities, including texturing, rigging, and rendering. Although capable of animation, Blender is predominantly praised for its utility in creating detailed 3D models and environments. Users appreciate its open-source nature which makes it accessible for students and freelancers looking to produce high-quality visual content without incurring heavy software costs. The distinction in use cases between the two platforms is fairly clear: Adobe After Effects is favored for advanced motion graphics and video effects primarily used in post-production video work, while Blender is celebrated for its comprehensive 3D design tools used across various applications like game development, visual effects, and virtual reality content creation.

Best Alternatives
	Adobe After Effects	Blender
Small Businesses	Autodesk Maya Score 9.2 out of 10	Onshape Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Blender Score 9.2 out of 10	Onshape Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises	Adobe Animate Score 8.2 out of 10	Navisworks Score 9.4 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Adobe After Effects	Blender
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.5 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	9.2 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Usability	8.6 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	9.9 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Adobe After Effects	Blender
Likelihood to Recommend	Adobe After Effects is well suited for creating short video projects that require intricate animation, like 5 minute or 1-minute countdowns, credit roll-ins, outros, and video bumpers. It is also useful for creating animated elements that can be incorporated into video projects, like animated key titles. For longer videos, I would recommend using Adobe Premiere Pro instead. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Blender is an excellent tool for everything from simple to complex 3D animations, the creation of 3D images, etc. It performs excellently in all of these areas. In the realm of 3D modelling, animation and rendering, there is very little that Blender is not suited for. Incentivized Kèlene Poyurs Co-Founder Read full review
Pros	After Effects is great for creating motion content once and easily exporting it to various formats such as web, broadcast, GIF, etc. After Effects is the industry standard for motion graphics. While I’m an Apple user and have used Motion in the past it is not as feature rich and most clients will expect you to use After Effects. After Effects is great for complex UI animation. Tools like principle and Flinto are great but are quite cumbersome for complex UI animations. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender. Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc. Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in. Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections. The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software. The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender. Incentivized Jitendra Choubisa AR VR Content Developer Read full review
Cons	I would like the Re-Link file structure to mimic Premiere. I would like to see native .obj importing and manipulation. I would like to see better audio editing available within Adobe After Effects. if it could be given a separate layer/panel. Incentivized AR Alexander Ross-Edwards Motion Designer Read full review	It would be great to see a render queue added. This would increase my productivity significantly. Currently I don't have budget for a render farm. Meaning I have to do my renders overnight, however some renders only take a few hours. A render queue would allow me to make the most of the 12+ hours I'm out of the office. UV editing, in particular unwrapping or projecting can produce varied results. Incentivized BG Benjamin Gwyn Senior Graphic Designer Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	I will renew my use of After Effects since it's affordable and always has been reliable. They also always continue to update new features and add new things to compete with other software out there. I also like all the 3rd party plugins out there that keep my interest for the future and new toolsets and creative solutions. ANDREW TOUTANT Sr. Designer / Art Direction Read full review	No answers on this topic
Usability	There's a lot of features and functionality that Adobe After Effects offers that can be hard to navigate at times. Depending on the depth you plan to use the software for, that can take some time to learn. The built-in templates and tutorials really help soften that learning curve. Once you get past some of the basics, it's fairly simple to use. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Because while it's a pretty good piece of software, the default built-in commands, the interface layout, and certain functions aren't as logical in their way of being arranged and executed. This, of course, doesn't diminish its use or effectiveness in your field of work, but it is quite awkward at first. A big advantage is that Blender lets you customize the interface however you want as well as keyboard shortcuts and several general program parameters. Incentivized CL Carlos Lopez Animation and VFX Engineer Read full review
Support Rating	Adobe customer support is wonderful. They genuinely care about their product and the end user experience. The products they create have always been innovative and continue to improve. They have a huge chunk of the user market in their field and still strive to improve. This is such a big deal for me and other small business/organizations that need their products and don't have a large voice on our own. Incentivized Nicole Rayne Director of Design Read full review	No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered	I've created videos with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe PhotoShop (with the GIF function), as well as Canva and other online products. Adobe Premiere Pro does not have the same capabilities for creating vector-based content, meaning if that is necessary, Adobe After Effects is superior. The video format functionality of Adobe PhotoShop is more basic and works similarly to Adobe After Effects, so I would choose to use Adobe After Effects over Photoshop for video-making needs because of the increased capability. Incentivized Avery Chipman Interior Designer Read full review	Well, in fact, I haven't used any of that software, but there is one thing I know: Blender is free. That's huge for small business owners like me; it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. I have heard other people saying that the Autodesk offerings have some other tools Blender doesn't have and are better for animation, especially Maya, but no small-engineering business owner cares for that. Now, from the animation and artistic point of view, even if my business was making animated movies indie, I'd used Blender simply by its cost. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Adobe After Effects has a great impact on business as maximum work can be done in one software To run this software you need to have good configuration system Motion Graphics, 2d Animation and video editing can be done in one software Verified User Anonymous Read full review	As it is a beginner-friendly software with increasing demand in the animation sector again, it positively impacts the business. Except in some specific cases, no one will use Blender on their own at a professional level. When I was a beginner, it took me a lot of time to learn, consequently designing the creation. But if we want to learn to master Blender, we can do it. As long as we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities. Incentivized Aniket Kumar Chaudhary Content Writer & Video Editor Read full review
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