Cassie Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 🤘 GSAP has been acquired by Webflow to take their animation capabilities to the next level Read our announcement here GSAP will continue to be publicly available for everyone to use on the wider web. Both Webflow and the GSAP team are committed to maintaining and evolving the library, including for use outside of Webflow. We love this community and it’s important to us that GSAP continues to be the go-to toolset for web animators everywhere. If you pay for GSAP, we are honoring your current pricing plan and licensing – so it's just business as usual! Until now, creating a GSAP GUI was an impossible pipe dream for our small team (despite all the requests for it) but with Webflow's expertise and resources - we're in good hands. The Webflow team has a knack for creating clean easy-to-use interfaces, and we're incredibly excited about combining our expertise to bring something beautiful to life. We'd love to hear from you about what your hopes are as we join the Webflow family. What are your ideas, hopes and struggles? What would you like to see from a native GSAP implementation? Help us shape the future of animations and interactions in Webflow! 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Web Bae Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 Congrats you all! Amazing news! Can’t wait to connect at conf about it. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mustapha Mushi Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 Amazing news, congrats to y'all. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joevin Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 Congratulations! Well deserved. I look forward to seeing GSAP evolve! (Especially outside of Webflow even if it's pretty cool 🙂) 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nico23 Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 GSAP announcement states that GSAP powers 12 millions websites! That is amazing. Amazing tool and no wonder why you guys reached such a big number. On the other hand, webflow announcement states that webflow + gsap powers only 100,000 websites. That's 0.83% of all GSAP websites. I can't see how will this will be better for 99%+ of current GSAP users. On the contrary, I don't think this is the best news for us. For me, a developer who is using GSAP for over 7 years, this is kinda sad news. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BadWebDev Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 I've often been a lurker of the forums simply because it is often better to not saying anything when there is nothing to say. As such, I don't expect that this comment will get an undue level of respect or appreciation from such an unknown origin. Let that desire for tact be the lens through which I share the sadness this brings me as a frontend developer that loved GSAP and used it to create many great experiences for clients. This is unfortunately a common scenario that often comes before the second stage of enshitification for nearly every online product or service. I hope to be proven wrong. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodrigo Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 Hi @nico23 and welcome to the GSAP Forums! Let me be the first one to say that this is not going to change anything, GSAP will remain framework agnostic and users of every framework/library/tool that have been using GSAP for years, like you, will keep on doing it. GSAP will give animation superpowers to all of it's users out there. We understand and will hear all the concerns our fantastic user base could have, but we remain committed in crafting and delivering the tools so you can create the magic 🪄 anywhere/anyhow you want/need. Our users and the incredibly (sometimes indescribable and jaw dropping) things they have created with GSAP are the best example of what GSAP does and what best represents what GSAP IS, so it wouldn't make any sense to take this step if GSAP wouldn't remain available for everyone that wants to do amazing stuff on the web. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 15 Author Share Posted October 15 I entirely understand your concerns. To be completely transparent, they're the same concerns we had going into these conversations. This process took a long time and we wouldn't have taken this move at all without feeling entirely comfortable with the future of GSAP on the wider web. There's already an existing pattern in this industry with framer and pop motion. Framer motion powers framer's visual builder - but it's also widely used in React projects outside of framer. We took a lot of time and care in this decision. Webflow are just as committed as us to continue innovating and maintaining the core library - after all, that's what they're building their interaction engine on! We were incredibly impressed by how caring, smart and kind everyone at Webflow has been, and how creative and well matched our communities are. Our core team is staying the same, Jack is still the library maintainer, we're still the GSAP team. We still deeply care about GSAP from the perspective of all the people that use it! I understand that actions speak louder than words though - so hopefully our actions over the next year or so will put you at ease. 💚 Thanks for voicing your concerns, we knew that there will be some reticence and we're going to do everything we can to make this a net positive for everyone. We're truly, incredibly excited about the future. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris7777 Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 I'm genuinely happy that the GSAP team have made a decision that they believe with accelerate the direction they want to take GSAP in future. With the runway provided through the funding of a larger company, you will hopefully be able to tackle things you weren't previously. So, first, congratulations! However, as a member of the community, I can't help but feel saddened. I’ve been part of the Greensock community since the AS3 days. I fondly recall when you added Timeline, so that still feels “new and shiny” to me. I was also a BusinessGreen member for 3 years (currently paused because the parent project was paused). One of the (many) things that makes GSAP great is Jack and the team. You help with questions quickly and politely, often with detailed examples, and friendly follow up. During an acquisition, this is often the thing that is lost. The human touch. You may stay on for a while but I don’t see how a company like Webflow can maintain a community like GSAP in such a personable way. I truly want to be proven wrong, and I'm 100% positive your intend to keep the community personable, but acquisitions in the tech world have an extremely salty history. A recent and comparable example is WPEngine's acquisition of ACF. ACF was a plugin developed by a small team, extremely polished product, and built up a community over about 10 years. After the acquisition, code quality dropped, support became automated (even as a paying customer), and they slapped WPEngine marketing all over ACF client-facing pages. In short, it became soulless, quickly. I want to end on a positive note though, with an example of a successful acquisition in the tech world. Sentry acquiring SyntaxFM. It is super clear, and reassuring, that Wes and Scott continue to lead creative control. Yes, there is some Sentry branding and marketing, but its clear to their community the guys are still leading direction. I'm sure GSAP will be an example of a successful acquisition. And by successful, I mean to the existing team, the inbound team, and the community as a whole. People don't love change, its just in our nature, but I am happy for the team. Congratulations again! 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 16 Author Share Posted October 16 Quote You may stay on for a while but I don’t see how a company like Webflow can maintain a community like GSAP in such a personable way. We're not going anywhere, Jack's still the library maintainer and I'm the 'product manager' for GSAP (aka, exactly the same job) Personally I have no motivation to leave at all. It's still the job I love, but with additional things I'm excited about and more resources. The community management is still going to be us at the end of the day! Actions will speak louder than words though 💚 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal Potasz Posted October 16 Share Posted October 16 Congratulations GSAP team! At first, I shared some of the common concerns that often come with acquisitions, especially worries about potential changes for existing users. However, knowing that the GSAP team will remain intact gives me a decent amount of confidence. You have built an incredible community, and I don't see why you would do anything to jeopardise that. If GSAP can retain its framework-agnostic approach, this acquisition could actually be a positive step. It means more people will have access to creating smooth & performant animations. I would love to see how Webflow created a GUI for all this stuff. (I have been on the fence between coding and low-code tools, so any innovation in that area is an interesting one I think). Of course, balancing work between Core GSAP development and deeper integration into Webflow could be a challenge..? So we'll see One question that does come to mind is why an acquisition was chosen over a partnership. I’m more curious than skeptical—I’m sure A LOT of thought went into this decision. It would be educational to learn more about the strategic benefits that an acquisition brings over a partnership - but I realise that perhaps it can't be all shared. @Chris7777 I like your comment on Sentry/Syntax, 100% agree & hope that this acquisition follows a similar path! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 16 Author Share Posted October 16 Quote Of course, balancing work between Core GSAP development and deeper integration into Webflow could be a challenge..? So we'll see We'll have a team from Webflow doing the integration - we'll likely be in more advisory roles, and (I think) Jack is getting more help with the actual library maintainance. It's all very early days so obviously we'll see how it shakes out, but we'd be hard pressed to be spread thinner than we currently are! A lot of the current periphery tasks that take up our time can be passed over to Webflow staff with specific experience (things like hosting/cloudflare/server stuff), so (hopefully) more time for working on the library and supporting the community. Sentry/Syntax is definitely a good comparison. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deJardine Posted October 17 Share Posted October 17 It makes no sense to me, Webflow is a closed system for no-coders. The best of the web is always designers and developers working in tandem, not a drag and drop tool. This feels much like Old El Paso purchasing an Authentic Mexican food restaurant 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sageseph Posted October 17 Share Posted October 17 Congrats to the whole GSAP Team!😁 As a Webflow developer this excites me and I hope one of the feats that would be part of the integration is being able to use the club plugins for us to not anymore uplaod the js of it on a separate hosting site like Github but instead integrated on the Webflow system itself. That would be great I think. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 17 Author Share Posted October 17 Yes! @sageseph - that's one of the first things we're going to work on. 💚 Thanks so much for the kind words - super glad your community is hyped! @deJardine - A few notes here. Webflow isn't really a closed system for no coders, or at least that's not how all of their community use it! A lot of people in our community use Webflow. Here's a few sites that come to mind... https://www.accordion.net.au/ https://www.sonarmusic.com.au/ https://www.itsoffbrand.com/ https://www.chronothreads.com/ https://www.str8fire.io/ https://www.robhemus.co.uk/ https://www.kaloyanmad.com/ https://baronissisportsclub.webflow.io/ The GSAP community and the Webflow community have a big overlap, lots of creative developers, lots of designers and newbies learning to code by experimenting with animations. At the end of the day we don''t need to be completely 100% aligned in terms of users though, it's an overlap with potential, not a 1-1 match. To use your analogy our 'authentic mexican restaurant' is still going to be serving our usual customer base, and still making new things - we're just teaming up with Old El Paso too because their users keep bringing our Guacamole into the restaurant in takeout containers and using it instead of their in house guac. Better Guac for everyone! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreenSock Posted October 17 Share Posted October 17 On 10/16/2024 at 7:38 AM, Rafal Potasz said: One question that does come to mind is why an acquisition was chosen over a partnership. I’m more curious than skeptical—I’m sure A LOT of thought went into this decision. It would be educational to learn more about the strategic benefits that an acquisition brings over a partnership - but I realise that perhaps it can't be all shared. There are several reasons from my vantage point: Put yourself in Webflow's shoes - imagine investing a ton of resources into integrating GSAP and building a product on TOP of it...there's a lot of risk there. Even though GSAP has a SUPER long track record of being rock solid and caring about backwards compatibility, what if development suddenly stopped? What if GSAP took a hard right turn and went in a different direction that left Webflow in a super awkward spot having built on top of it? Would they suddenly have to rip it out and build something from scratch themselves? Can you imagine what a nightmare that'd be and how damaging it could be for their product (and ultimately their users)? A "partnership" or a special license is not nearly as safe long-term as an acquisition. It's very smart of them to think this way and to guard their users from disruption like that. An acquisition allows Webflow to put their team around the GSAP team for very tight integration and also understanding the core deeply. It could be super valuable from a knowledge standpoint and more seamless integration. For GSAP, it makes sense because Webflow can put a lot of resources around not only integration, but also pushing the product forward (more so than just one guy). The Webflow team has a ton of experience and expertise to bring to the equation. It allows the GSAP team to focus more on its core competencies rather than things like server management, marketing, etc. We'll build better together I think. I personally have been very impressed with the Webflow team and all the people I've met there. The leadership seems solid and their vision matches ours. They're super committed to leaving GSAP just like it is for the wider web - they will NOT wall it off or force people to use Webflow in order to get access to GSAP. Quite the contrary. This is just exposing even more people to GSAP, lowering the barrier to entry. It's a win-win from pretty much all the angles I considered, although I understand some of the concerns you (and others) voiced. Give us time - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. 💚 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal Potasz Posted October 17 Share Posted October 17 @GreenSock Wow, thanks for replying to that particular question, wasn't expecting a reply to that! That makes a lot of sense to be honest, if I were them I would probably do something similar. And that direct connection to the knowledge of how GSAP works at its core is probably invaluable... Zero guessing - just ask you guys. Quite a few times I've been stumped during projects for this exact reason, I didn't understand how something worked under the hood and then my brain melted whilst learning/debugging hehe 🫠. Thanks for the reply! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickWoodward Posted October 18 Share Posted October 18 I'm just not sure I see how you both align from a customer perspective. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it feels like they'll have a pretty large incentive to get people building on webflow, not elsewhere, regardless of what they say 🤷♂️. And I also can't really see how a GUI is good for those developers who've learnt without. Sure, the exposure is great for GSAP more broadly, and I'm happy for the team from that perspective, but it feels like it opens the door to devalue skills people have learnt. Just a bit worried about it tbh 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 19 Author Share Posted October 19 Quote Perhaps I'm wrong, but it feels like they'll have a pretty large incentive to get people building on webflow, not elsewhere, regardless of what they say Of course they will, that's not a secret! They're not pretending to be doing this from an entirely charitable perspective. GSAP's going to be powering their interactions engine, that's a huge incentive to get people building on Webflow. It's the same pattern as framer and framer motion. Quote And I also can't really see how a GUI is good for those developers who've learnt without Well, Developers who already use GSAP can just carry on using GSAP like they were before! I don't think that lowering the barrier to entry devalues skills of people who are knowledgable, code will always be more powerful and flexible. I think it'll be interesting to see how successfully we can bridge the divide between design and dev and how we can help on-ramp people into the code itself. As someone who came into code from a Design background, I would have found a visual interface very useful when I was getting started. I'm all for it. I'll always choose to democratise knowledge over gatekeeping access out of fear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickWoodward Posted October 19 Share Posted October 19 1 hour ago, Cassie said: I'll always choose to democratise knowledge over gatekeeping access out of fear Maybe I didn't describe it well, but gatekeeping feels like a pretty unfair characterisation of my position tbh. If we ignore copyright, I wouldn't describe artists' concerns over AI as 'gatekeeping out of fear', I'd describe them as correctly worrying that people skip straight to the end product. I'm not gatekeeping knowledge - that's how to get there, how to paint, how to animate - I'm concerned that one-click solutions or drag and drop animations eliminate or at least massively reduce the *need* for knowledge. Sure, "code will always be more powerful and flexible" - but a similar line makes sense for artists, and I'm not sure that alters the fact that it negatively impacts them Call it selfish, but animation felt like one of a dwindling number of half decent ways to insulate myself from the march of AI through the industry. Maybe it would've happened anyway and I'm being unfair, or I could just straight up be wrong, but a deeper integration with a website builder feels like it brings that concern closer. Either way, one thing I don't personally think it is, is gatekeeping. Just my 2 cents 🤷♂️ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 19 Author Share Posted October 19 I understand where you're coming from, I don't mean to imply that you're gatekeeping. Just that I personally would always choose to lower the barrier to entry and make things easier for more people where I can. I have the same position as you on AI too. But this isn't going to be a magical "one click and your site is awwwards worthy", it's not going to be stealing other peoples hard work. It's going to be a visual way to use parts of the existing API. It'll still require understanding, and creativity and skill, just skills that a different set of people hold. Creativity is certainly one of the last safe havens from AI, but it's worth pointing out that AI and visual interfaces are different things. Tools like Framer/Motion Page/Squarespace/Wix/Elementor/Lottie/Rive etc have all been around for a while and happily co-existing with the existing development ecosystem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickWoodward Posted October 19 Share Posted October 19 24 minutes ago, Cassie said: I understand where you're coming from, I don't mean to imply that you're gatekeeping. Just that I personally would always choose to lower the barrier to entry and make things easier for more people where I can. I have the same position as you on AI too. But this isn't going to be a magical "one click and your site is awwwards worthy", it's not going to be stealing other peoples hard work. It's going to be a visual way to use parts of the existing API. It'll still require understanding, and creativity and skill, just skills that a different set of people hold. Creativity is certainly one of the last safe havens from AI, but it's worth pointing out that AI and visual interfaces are different things. Tools like Framer/Motion Page/Squarespace/Wix/Elementor/Lottie/Rive etc have all been around for a while and happily co-existing with the existing development ecosystem. Yeah I did have that thought about these tools already existing while writing it, so I guess from that perspective it is just ignorance. I just hope you're right that it's not a stepping stone on the way to a v0 like animation builder, because I can't help but think all of those page builders would bite your hand off for such a tool. (with the caveat that v0 interfaces look like ass!) *edit: quick question if you don't mind? are you guys doing the green-friday promotion again? or do you not know yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassie Posted October 19 Author Share Posted October 19 Not sure what V0 is! Also not sure about Green Friday! I'll let you know though 👀 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickWoodward Posted October 19 Share Posted October 19 12 minutes ago, Cassie said: Not sure what V0 is! Also not sure about Green Friday! I'll let you know though 👀 Thanks! v0 is an AI interface for a UI library (shadcn afaik) - so you just describe what you want and it builds it. Made by Vercel. Currently pretty crap - but I said that about AI's ability to build apps, and that assessment is now looking pretty shaky! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m4g1c14n Posted October 24 Share Posted October 24 Have been a member since GreenSock-AS2 Era, as a business owner I am very happy for GSAP, and I know that hard work deserves rewards no matter what everyone think about it, but I will be very sad if there are any number of instances of text "WebFlow" on GSAP Pricing pages in the near future : such as "ABC Plugin is only available for GSAP x Web Flow member" But even then, I can be happy for you guys, the library GSAP is truly one of a kind ( as I have no idea which other animation library that has exists since ActionScript 2.0 ), it just means that I might be using the GSAP v3.12 forever >.< PS : And please , do not let GSAP v3.13 already contains any text of "WebFlow" anywhere on the changelog ( such features walled by certain requirement to force us to use WebFlow is a bit too much for me I think ) And hopefully this means we will get GSAP v3.13 ( or better yet GSAP v4 ) sooner rather then later Best of luck for GSAP Team, please let me still be GSAP member without forcing me directly or indirectly to use WebFlow :D 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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