When comparing Spriter vs Expressive Animator, the Slant community recommends Spriter for most people. In the question“What are the best free 2D animation tools?” Spriter is ranked 1st while Expressive Animator is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Spriter is:
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Quick and easy keyframe animation
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
Pro Easy configuration of character maps
Spriter makes it easy to change the character skin, and the animations persists.
Pro Integration for Unity3D and Construct 2
Modules supporting direct import of Spriter's SCML animations are available for Unity3D and Construct 2.
Pro Price
Price is a lot less than Spine for the pro version and goes on sales often.
Pro Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2
Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2.
Pro Has a Free and a Pro version
Pro Steam intergration
Steam integration is great for updates and tracking hour progression with the software.
Pro 14-day trial
Pro Animated SVG export (SMIL, CSS, JS)
You can animate your vector graphics and export them as animated SVG, with options for interactivity.
Pro Advanced Easing Editor
You can create your own custom easing functions, like Oversoot, Bounce, Elastic, and more.
Pro Frequent updates
The app is still in development, but with every update it gets more and more powerful.
Considering that this is an app made by 2 people.
Pro Works offline
You can install it on your desktop as a PWA, and use it offline.
Pro It's part of a suite of creative apps
Cons
Con Sluggish performance with Unity Runtime
Con This version will never have 3D mess support
Yes, there will be a free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2 which will have this feature, but it will be years until that program is read as mentioned on the official site. The issue being that they do not have a way to program this in their current exported runtime. So, for not both Dragon Bones, Spine, and Blender, are the best options it seems for 3D mesh support which really adds something to game animations.
Con No hotkeys for stepping through animation frames
Stepping the animation forward and backward requires using the mouse, extremely inconvenient when fine-tuning motion paths.
Con No curved paths
All motion paths are linear. Curves have to be simulated by hand-placing additional keyframes.
Con Pro
Need knowledge in animator specification of profession