DaVinci Resolve Fusion vs After Effects for motion graphics: which should you use?

Use After Effects if your deliverable is standalone motion graphics — UI animation, Lottie export, template-driven work — because its plugin and template ecosystem is the industry standard. Use Fusion if you already edit and grade in DaVinci Resolve: it handles serious motion graphics inside the same free app, with zero round-tripping.

Decide based on where your footage lives and what you deliver, not on feature checklists — the two tools overlap heavily for standard motion graphics work.

Workflow architecture. After Effects is layer-based: faster to learn, faster for template and text-driven work, and the model most tutorials and presets assume. Fusion is node-based: each operation is a node you wire together, which scales more cleanly on complex composites — no nested precomps to dig through — but takes longer to get fluent in.

Ecosystem and deliverables. After Effects has the largest motion graphics ecosystem — third-party plugins, expression libraries, marketplace templates, and Lottie/UI-animation export pipelines. If you deliver motion graphics as the end product, especially for UI or web, that ecosystem is the deciding factor. Fusion's third-party ecosystem is smaller, so you build more from primitives.

Cost and pipeline integration. Fusion ships inside DaVinci Resolve, including the free version, so editing, motion graphics, color grading, and audio live in one application with no exports between them. After Effects is subscription-only and sits outside your editor, so every graphic round-trips into your timeline.

What Fusion actually covers in practice. Documented Fusion workflows handle the full working range of motion graphics: camera-tracked overlays that stay locked to objects in moving footage via the Fusion Tracker; bouncy UI widget pop-ins built by offsetting width and height keyframes 1–2 frames apart with ease curves (select the spline keyframes and press S for ease-in/ease-out); Edge Detect applied as an adjustment clip for a subtle glow; dual-axis scan lines rotated 90° to each other for a dot-matrix screen look; curved B-spline paths so cursor animations move like a human hand; Quick Bevel for depth on flat UI elements; and film grain, film damage, and dust overlays (around 8% opacity) for cinematic texture. Keep effects like scan lines on their own adjustment clip so you can fade them independently. One documented build turned a static desktop screenshot into a full cinematic animation this way in about 5–10 minutes.

If you're compositing over AI-generated footage. Custom Resolve animations layered over generated clips are what separate a polished piece from raw AI output — one documented workflow generates clips with the invideo agent, then replaces or augments select shots with Fusion-built graphics inside the same app used for the grade.

The decision rule. Choose After Effects when motion graphics IS the deliverable, when you need Lottie or code-adjacent export, or when your team and template pipeline already run on it. Choose Fusion when motion graphics is one stage of a video you're editing and grading in Resolve anyway — you keep one tool, one timeline, and zero licensing cost. Many working editors use both: finish the video in Resolve, jump to After Effects only for ecosystem-dependent graphics.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

that took us like 5 or 10 minutes. It was not complicated at all, and it looks better than 99% of the stuff on YouTube.

— a creator documenting a DaVinci Resolve Fusion motion graphics workflow