26 After Effects Plugins to Use in 2026
- Boone
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Developers all over the world keep cranking out new plugins to make After Effects faster, smoother, and way more fun to use. So let’s check out what’s currently on the market — from fresh releases to recently updated tools you might’ve missed.
How do you install an After Effects plugin?
The term plugin is used broadly here, and can include both extensions and scripts. The key takeaway is that not all of these tools are installed via the same method. Be sure to follow each tool’s corresponding instructions.
The aescripts and aeplugins website allows you to download trial versions of all plugins, and they even have an installer to help get you up and running. Now onto the list.
*Affiliate links below. Thanks for the support! It really does help me out.
AEPathfinder is an advanced vector shape-editing extension for Adobe After Effects that fills major gaps in AE’s native Merge Paths tools. It enables precise operations like divide, trim, outline, intersect, subtract, and exclude across single or multiple shape layers. With fast, non-destructive, one-click processing and no expressions, AEPathfinder generates clean, editable shape layers ideal for logos, UI animation, reveals, and complex vector workflows—making vector shapes behave the way motion designers expect.
Ballpoint is a GPU-accelerated plugin for Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro that transforms footage into expressive ballpoint-pen sketches. Inspired by technical drawings and notebook doodles, it redraws video with dense, reactive linework on aged paper textures. Featuring real-time performance, keyframable controls, brush-sensitive parameters, and multiple preset styles, Ballpoint is ideal for reveal animations, stylized illustrations, and hand-drawn visual effects.
Bento is a lightweight grid-layout tool for Adobe After Effects that lets you create bento-box style layouts in seconds. With simple controls for rows, columns, spacing, roundness, and randomized layouts, it makes designing multi-panel compositions fast and flexible. Once your layout is ready, Bento converts boxes into pre-comps with mattes in just two clicks—so you can drop in assets and animate immediately.
Chartist is a fast, flexible chart-building toolkit for Adobe After Effects designed for high-performance data visualization. It lets you create bar charts, line graphs, and heat maps with advanced, keyframe-based animations and zero expressions for smooth previews and renders. Import CSV data or paste values instantly, customize every visual detail, and control entire charts from a single master comp—making professional, brand-ready infographics quick and effortless.
Moglyph FX 4 is a procedural motion-graphics toolkit that lets you clone and animate glyph shapes or text inside a single text layer, using Cinema 4D–style Cloners and Effectors. It includes multiple cloner types (spline, grid, radial, spiral, brick, and more), falloff-driven effectors for sequential, random, audio, mask, and shader-based animation, plus a large library of themed glyph fonts and demo projects. New features add rings cloner, random-character “Hash” mode, text-style control, aim/target constraints, and brush-style glyphs.
Anchor Pro 2 is a precision anchor-point management tool for After Effects and Premiere Pro that lets you reposition anchor points without breaking existing animation. It supports alpha-based detection, saved anchor presets, keyboard shortcuts, and direct anchor dragging for fast, accurate alignment. Whether you’re working with clips, layers, or sequences, Anchor Pro 2 makes complex anchor adjustments predictable, reversible, and production-safe.
Recent update: Version 2 added Transform Effect support, separated dimensions and improved 3D layer handling in After Effects, plus Spell Book integration and major UI, UX, and performance improvements.
drAEw is a vector drawing and animation toolkit that lets artists draw, animate, and storyboard directly inside After Effects. It combines sketch-style freedom with precise, timeline-ready shape layers, featuring vector brushes, onion skinning, frame duration control, and flexible export options. Draw frame by frame, animate instantly, and push your work as editable shapes or keyframed layers—eliminating the need to jump between sketch apps and your animation timeline.
expressCode brings a modern code editor directly into After Effects, making expressions and scripts faster, safer, and easier to manage. It lets you edit every expression in your comp from one place with IntelliSense autocomplete, hover documentation, real-time error checking, and batch editing. Built on the same editor as Visual Studio Code, it also includes an expression library for one-click reuse and team sharing.
MAD PAINTER is a GPU-accelerated painting plugin by Pixel Sorter Studio that transforms footage into expressive, hand-painted artwork. It applies animated brush strokes directly over video, with full control over brush size, style, and texture. Designed for real-time experimentation and fast rendering, MAD PAINTER lets artists create painterly, impressionist looks—from subtle motion texture to bold, stylized visuals—using hardware-accelerated performance.
Marker Maestro Pro by Rob Womack is a powerful marker-management panel that turns markers into an editable, spreadsheet-style interface. It displays all comp and layer markers in one place, allowing instant editing, batch updates, duplication, and precise time shifting using shorthand timecode. With improved UI/UX, vertical and horizontal marker moves, multi-layer copying, and work-area controls, Marker Maestro Pro makes organizing, adjusting, and navigating complex marker setups fast and intuitive.
Mask Null by grape design lets you control masks using null layers while maintaining a live, editable connection. With one click, it creates a null at the mask’s center and allows you to animate mask position, scale, rotation, and opacity by keyframing the null. You can bake and unlink the result or instantly convert the mask into a matching shape layer, all through a clean, minimal interface.
Maskform 2 by Hassaan Ahmad is a precision mask-transformation tool that gives you full numerical control over mask shapes. It lets you apply accurate transforms like scale, rotation, skew, and skew axis directly to masks, with options to toggle editing, bake transformations, or remove them entirely. With a redesigned interface and non-destructive workflow, Maskform 2 makes complex mask adjustments clean, controlled, and easy to manage.
PastePath is a focused utility that makes copying and pasting paths reliable and predictable. It allows you to transfer mask and shape paths while preserving spatial position, transformations, and both static and keyframed animation. Paths can be pasted as masks or shapes, applied to existing paths, or used to generate new shape layers, making it ideal for VFX, motion design, and cleanup workflows where precision matters inside After Effects.
Pinna is a path-control utility that lets you add, manage, and animate nulls directly on selected path points for far more control than the built-in Create Nulls From Paths. You can freely choose which points get nulls, create controllers, followers, or tracing nulls, and fix common alignment issues caused by transforms. It also supports baking null animation back to paths, handle control without extra layers, and precise alignment tools for clean, flexible path animation inside After Effects.
The Positioner is a layout and alignment utility that makes building responsive designs fast and intuitive. It lets you pin layers to composition edges or other layers, apply padding, lock text height, and auto-scale elements so layouts adapt cleanly to changing aspect ratios. With multiple scale modes and a visual UI, it’s ideal for creating dynamic, edge-aware layouts that stay perfectly aligned as your design evolves inside After Effects.
PQ PostPerfect is a lightweight MOGRT that helps you design vertical videos with confidence by previewing accurate, platform-specific safe areas directly in your timeline. It overlays TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts UI boundaries so critical text and visuals aren’t hidden by captions, buttons, or progress bars. With customizable colors, opacity, and one-click toggles, it removes guesswork and speeds up quality control when editing short-form content in Premiere Pro.
Quick Depth 3 is an AI-powered depth estimation tool that generates high-quality depth maps from footage or still images with a near zero-click workflow. It runs locally on GPU or CPU, supports temporal consistency for smoother results, and enables effects like depth-of-field, parallax, and 3D camera moves from a single shot. With fast previews, multiple colormaps, and cross-platform support, it offers one of the quickest ways to add depth-based effects in After Effects.
Recent update: Version 3 introduced a new depth model that is up to 2× faster, adds temporal consistency, and includes the Quality Boost feature for extracting finer depth detail.
Reach Pro is a comprehensive productivity extension that centralizes commands, tools, and workflows into a fast, searchable interface. It lets you launch effects, presets, scripts, expressions, and utilities from a single panel, while also providing a large collection of built-in tools for animation, rigging, text, layers, keyframes, markers, cameras, and project cleanup. With bookmarking, customization, and one-click utilities, it dramatically reduces repetitive tasks and keeps complex projects organized inside After Effects.
Recent update: Version 3 introduced the new BONES rigging toolkit, adding path-based bone creation and shape binding for character and object animation.
Renderly 2 is a render-management script that replaces the work area–based workflow with flexible render sections you define once and reuse forever. It lets you create multiple render ranges per composition, store output settings, file names, and destinations, then render everything with a single click. Ideal for batch renders and complex timelines, it removes repetitive setup, keeps naming consistent, and gives you precise control over what gets rendered inside After Effects.
Select Layers Pro is a fast, toolbar-based utility that makes complex layer selection effortless. It lets you select layers by type, status, label color, position, or interval with a single click, while also managing Solo, Shy, and Lock states. Advanced options like selecting every Nth layer, random selections, copying selection states, and fully customizable buttons help keep large timelines organized and efficient inside After Effects.
SlabText is a typography utility that automatically adjusts each line of a paragraph to fill the available horizontal space, creating clean, poster-style text layouts. It intelligently balances scaling and tracking per line, preserves original formatting, and offers controls for leading, recoloring, and easy reset. With multiple modes and consistent results across long paragraphs, it’s ideal for titles, kinetic text, and layout-driven design inside After Effects.
Smart Marker is a streamlined utility that makes creating, moving, and managing markers fast and intuitive. It lets you generate markers from the current time, keyframes, or motion peaks, inherit labels automatically, and move markers between layers and compositions with a single click. With snapping tools, quick deletion options, and a clean minimal interface, it’s ideal for timing, organization, and animation planning inside After Effects.
Squash & Stretch Pro V2 is a behavior-based animation assistant that helps you create polished, professional motion quickly without relying on expressions or complex rigs. It applies handcrafted animation behaviors that generate clean, fully editable keyframes, automatically adapting to your layer’s size, timing, and existing animation. With intuitive controls like Oomph and Squash, built-in sound effects, text tools, and sequencing helpers, it’s designed to speed up everyday animation tasks while keeping you firmly in control inside After Effects.
Recent update: Version 2 introduced multi-behavior application with randomized assignment, a vastly expanded library of 171 behaviors, and a smarter text exploder that allows per-character, word, or line animation in a single click.
SuperZoom is an automation-focused extension that turns a series of photos taken at different zoom levels into seamless, cinematic zoom-ins. It automatically sorts images, warps and aligns each layer, matches color and exposure, feathers edges, and builds a fully parented composition so you can animate a smooth zoom just by scaling a single layer. Designed for real-world photography—from smartphones to DSLRs—it removes the manual setup usually required for complex multi-layer zoom effects inside After Effects.
Tracery is an automation-focused plugin for After Effects that tracks objects and regions based on color, then generates rich, data-driven visual overlays directly from your footage. It lets you build bounding boxes, center markers, coordinate readouts, arrows, and dynamic connection lines without manual keyframing. Designed for motion design, VFX, and infographics work, Tracery excels at turning raw video into sophisticated tracking graphics and visual noise systems.
Wave The Path is a GPU-accelerated animation tool that transforms any vector path into smooth, flowing waveform motion. It offers precise control over amplitude, frequency, speed, direction, rotation, and waveform type, with real-time previews and non-destructive editing. Advanced features like effector mask control allow waves to appear only in specific areas, enabling complex, organic animations that would be difficult to achieve manually in After Effects.
MoBar by MotionApe Ltd is an all-in-one workflow toolkit that acts like a Swiss Army knife for motion designers. It lets you build fully custom toolbars to organize your favorite effects, presets, scripts, and expressions, while also providing over 150 built-in tools for animation, text, layers, and keyframes. With a clean, dockable interface and a generous free version, MoBar dramatically speeds up everyday tasks and reduces UI clutter.
The Power of Expression is an educational tool and reference system designed to help After Effects users understand, write, and apply expressions more effectively. It breaks down complex expression concepts into clear, practical examples, making it easier to automate animations, build smarter rigs, and work more efficiently with procedural motion design techniques.
xCloner is a high-performance cloning plugin for After Effects that lets you duplicate thousands of layers instantly without timeline clutter. It supports linear, radial, grid, path, and object-based cloning, with precise control over spacing, rotation, randomness, blending, and transforms. Built for speed, xCloner handles massive clone counts smoothly, making it ideal for complex motion graphics, abstract design, and procedural layouts that would be impractical with standard duplication methods.
Workflower 2.5 is a customizable workflow automation system for After Effects that lets you build your own tools using a visual node-based interface. You can create macros, batch processes, and custom panels without coding, streamlining repetitive tasks and tailoring After Effects to your personal workflow.
What are some of your favorite After Effects plugins and extensions? Let me know in the comment section.
Check out my previous lists.
Comments