Yesterday Webflow announced it made GSAP completely free to use, even commercially. That’s genuinely exciting news! GSAP, or GreenSock Animation Platform, has been the gold standard for smooth web animations for years, and now there’s no licence standing between you and using it in production.

I do have a bit of history with GSAP: I’ve played with it, but never actually shipped it.

I remember discovering it early on, copy-pasting a gsap.to() example, watching a box glide across the screen, smooth bouncy transitions, and thinking “this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done on the web.” I spent an afternoon chaining tweens, trying out stagger, making things bounce with ease: "elastic.out", or making Apple like parallax effects with scrollTrigger plugin. It felt like magic compared to CSS transitions of 2018.

A side project here, a tutorial there. I got comfortable enough with the API to feel confident, but never crossed the line into a real deliverable. GSAP lived in my “things I know but haven’t used” drawer.

We had reach out to anime.js for one of the project, but that’s it. Never got a chance to actually add some sweet orchestrated animations to any production projects.

The licensing wasn’t the blocker for me, most of my work was either personal projects. But it was always a thing to justify. A conversation to have. Easier to reach for CSS animations and call it done.

Now that friction is gone. There’s nothing to justify. It’s just a library you can npm install like anything else, use commercially, and move on. That changes the default decision, just like Framer Motion, now the conversations will be instead of “is this worth pulling in GSAP for?”, the question is just “is an animation the right call here?”

I think a bigger community will now adopt it, and we’ll get more sparkly web ✨

To celebrate, here’s some random demo with GSAP, kind of thing I used to build. Move your mouse around and click inside.