Coding agents reach for HTML by default. Rive has features HTML doesn’t have natively, and runs them fast on every platform. Here is when to use each.

Use it whenRiveHTML

Your team builds it together: everyone works on the same production file, in the Rive Editor or as text with the Rive CLI, and several people can edit it in the Editor at once. Anyone can fix what they see instead of filing a change request, and Revision History keeps every version of the design.

It has to run smoothly everywhere you ship: it plays natively on web, iOS, Android, desktop, game engines, consoles, TVs, and cars, drawn by the same runtime.

You don't want a rewrite per platform: your agent edits it once, not separate web, Swift, and Kotlin code that drift apart.

You'd otherwise combine many libraries: rendering, layout, text, animation, 3D, audio, and input are built into one engine, so your agent uses them instead of writing and maintaining its own.

A lot moves at once: characters, layered vector animation, and interactive scenes that get heavy as DOM or SVG animation.

It's a game that should reach more than the browser: consoles, native mobile apps, and desktop, with no rewrite.

You want hands-on control: professional design and animation tools (Graph Editor, Timeline, bones and constraints, State Machine), made by the team that builds the format, runtimes, and Renderer, so every tool is made for what the runtimes play.

It needs what HTML can't do natively: rigging, constraints, N-slicing, text animation, and data binding, built into the format instead of hand-written code.

The logic has to behave the same everywhere: state machines, data binding, and scripts in the file run on every Rive runtime.

It has to stay small: compact files instead of video, image sequences, or a large JavaScript bundle.

It needs to be accessible: screen reader semantics and keyboard and gamepad focus are authored in the file.

It's mostly text, documents, or forms on the web.

It needs to be found through search, like articles and docs.

It's a simple web-only effect your agent can write in a few lines of CSS.

It's standard web UI built from ordinary components: settings, menus, and tables.

Most websites use both. Rive drops into any web page, app, or game as one component.

No handoff, no rebuild

What you design is what ships

Design, motion, interaction, and logic all live in Rive. Your agent builds it, your team shapes it by hand, and open-source runtimes play it on web, mobile, desktop, consoles, smart TVs, and cars.

Runtime docs

All runtimes

No translation

Developers and agents don’t rebuild your design in code. They load the file and bind data to it.

No handoff

Agents, designers, and developers all work in Rive.

No drift

Change the file, and every platform gets the same change.

Open-source runtimes

Web

iOS

macOS

Android

Flutter

React

React Native

Unity

Unreal

C++

Framer

Webflow

Wix Studio

MIT-licensed runtimes. No royalties, no revenue share, no runtime fees. Also runs on consoles, smart TVs, cars, and custom hardware.

Why teams choose Rive

Ship faster, spend less, build better

Rive holds the design, code, and motion, and what you build is what ships. That one change cuts time to market and cost, and raises the bar on quality.

Faster time to market

Designers, animators, developers, and agents all work in Rive, so there’s no handoff and nothing to rebuild for each platform.

Agent speed, artist control

Your agent builds with the Rive CLI in Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, in hours instead of weeks. Then your team refines it by hand in the Rive Editor, with professional tools for rigging, timelines, state machines, and data binding.

Lower cost

No revenue share, no runtime fees, no royalties, and MIT open-source runtimes. One engine covers every screen, from the car dashboard to the phone app, so there’s one thing to build, review, and maintain.

Higher quality

Vector, raster, and 3D in one scene, drawn by the Rive Renderer. It’s light enough for an underpowered car GPU, so you can build experiences where you wouldn’t run HTML or a full game engine.

FAQ

Questions about Rive and HTML

Straight answers, including when HTML is the better call.

Can’t my agent just write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

It can, and you code with Rive too. Think of Rive as a game engine, but not just for games. It pays off for experiences with a lot of motion and interactivity, especially when they ship on more than one platform. With other frameworks, the design lives in Figma, the product lives in a codebase per platform, and every design change gets rebuilt. In Rive, agents, developers, designers, and animators work in Rive, in the Rive CLI or the Editor. And instead of combining libraries for rendering, layout, text, animation, 3D, and audio, your agent uses what’s built into one engine.

Do I give anything up when my agent builds in Rive?

No. With the Rive CLI your agent writes the file, and it can take on the rigging, state machine, and view model setup too. You also get a file your team can open and edit in the Rive Editor.

What does it cost?

Building is free, and so are the runtimes. Exporting a file without the Rive splash screen needs a paid plan.

Will my agent always get it right?

No agent output is guaranteed, in Rive or in HTML. In Rive you can see what it made in the Editor, fix it by hand, and name the fix when you prompt again.

In production

Products built with Rive reach over 2 billion users

Teams at Spotify, Duolingo, Disney, and Riot Games ship with Rive. Here’s what they and independent builders say about it.

Alex Norström

Co-CEO, Spotify

More than 300 million users engaged, which was up 20%, and we saw more than 630 million shares across social media, which is up 42%. Even more, day 1 of Wrapped marked the highest single day of subscriber intake in Spotify history.

Kurt Hartfelder

Duolingo

Rive's State Machine is a game changer. We here at Duolingo have an ever-growing library of animated assets across our app. The State Machine helps us scale our work and bridge the animator-developer gap in ways that were previously inaccessible.

Theo

@theo

I’m super impressed. Can’t recommend Rive highly enough!

Frederik List

@kueiniu

I'm here to tell you Rive is now the most insane 2D game engine out there. … It rescales thousands of vector graphics at 120 fps on a 5 year old MacBook with hundreds of enemies and destructible assets on screen.

Spotify

@Spotify

Our creative team started w/ a basic bar-graph concept, used dummy data to prototype newer ideas and nail the motion, then built the final animation in Rive.

Marshall Gould

@MarshallJGould

made this animation in one hour with the new Rive CLI man i love Rive

Praha

lander.studio

The only tool we use for animation is @rive_app. Our agency relies entirely on Rive for its features, and we believe it's the #1 solution for this type of animation. Rive animations are lightweight and high-performance too.

Lucas Teixeira

@lucastex_ai

The Rive CLI + GPU canvas is a surprisingly powerful combo: Luau scripting, WGSL shaders, data binding and state machines, all in a single Rive file.

José Gonçalves

Design Lead, Phantom

Spotify Wrapped being made with @rive_app feels like the confirmation that the app design industry was looking for (even though @duolingo @phantom etc were already on it)

Hayden Bleasel

@haydenbleasel

Built with @rive_app WebGL2, it provides smooth, high-performance animations for various AI interaction states including idle, listening, thinking, speaking, and asleep.

Dushyant Dubey

Sr. Motion Designer, CARS24

By switching to Rive, we achieved up to 90% smaller animation file sizes (from ~150KB to ~15KB), leading to a 10% reduction in app launch times, and a 50% faster design-to-development handoff.

Jared Gay

Sr. Motion Designer, Intercom

Before Rive, I would think in terms of technical limitations. Now there's a lot more freedom to iterate and test.

Joey Korenman

@jkorenman

I think it's the greatest new tool for motion designers of the past 10 years probably … what Rive lets you do is what Flash used to let you do but in a much more powerful way.

Dan Fessler

@DanFessler

Greatest thing since scaleform for UI design in game engines… but like actually built from the ground up end to end and 1000x better

Michael Chiu

Dropbox

Rive unlocked a completely new mode of interactivity for us that just wouldn’t have been possible without it.

hansonerere

@hansonerere2

My most complex @rive_app scripting experiment so far: custom particle generating a custom 3D form … Still amazed by how powerful Rive is.

wab.eth

@wabdoteth

@rive_app is the best lightweight animation software out there; going to be the most addictive health app on the market

FitzChivalry

@boredpxnda

figured out how to use @rive_app events with SwiftUI and I dont think the world understands just how much is about to change.

Join our newsletter

Get all the latest Rive news delivered to your inbox.