In the past few years, browsers have come a long way when it comes to supporting newer CSS properties that allow developers to create nice effects and animations using just pure CSS.

There is a lot of browser support for using different transitions and keyframe animations in your projects now. You no longer have to rely on JavaScript libraries to add basic animations. You can animate your web pages with CSS alone!

Animating different elements on a webpage is now easier than ever. However, it can still be very confusing or daunting for absolute beginners. In this post, we will cover some of the best CSS animation libraries on CodeCanyon that you can use to add fancy CSS animation and stunning CSS effects to your webpages today.

CSS Animations and Effects on CodeCanyon

If you head over to the CSS Animations and Effects section on CodeCanyon, you will see that there are currently over 140 different libraries related to CSS animations.

New libraries are added periodically to the collection, and you can select one from the best-sellers or apply your own filters to fine-tune the results.

There are libraries to animate all kinds of elements or apply different kinds of effects to elements like buttons.

Best CSS Animations Libraries (On CodeCanyon for 2021)

1. CSS3 Image Hover Effects

The first one on our list is CSS3 Image Hover Effects. You can use it to add around 17 different kinds of image hover animations.

This includes basic CSS effects like fading and sliding overlays, as well as more advanced animations like splitting overlays and joining overlays. Other interesting effects include corner ribbons and image stacks.

Visit the description page to find out more about the library. The video on the description page shows all the animations in action.

2. CSS3 Mega Tooltip Animation Pack

This CSS3 Mega Tooltip Animation Pack offers a great solution for people who want to integrate nice animations with different tooltips on their website.

This great CSS animations pack comes with ten different tooltip animations. There are eight predefined color options. However, you can change the CSS files to add your own unique colors.

There is support for all major browsers. You can even support browsers as old as IE8 with a fix included in the download files after purchase.

The download files also contain detailed documentation and HTML samples that illustrate how to use the animation pack effectively.

3. tFigure—Image Captions

The tFigure—Image Captions library offers five different hover animations to display image captions.

You can use them to show nicely animated captions for different images. The overlays for each animation are available in four different colors.

The animations themselves are pretty simple. However, the way in which the captions are laid out on the overlays makes them very attractive.

These animations are framework independent, so you can install them on any website you want. They are also easily customizable, so you can make sure that the color scheme of the overlay matches the theme of your website.

Check out the animation's live preview page to see the awesome image caption animation in action.

4. Animated Loaders Kit

There are a lot of times when users might have to wait a while for a process to complete. This might be a very large image that has to load or some other computational process that needs to complete.

If the process takes a few seconds, it is a good practice to let users know that you are working on it. A good way to do that is with simple animated loaders.

The Animated Loaders Kit is perfect for this situation. It comes with ten CSS-only animated loaders.

There are many advantages of using these pure CSS-based animated loaders. They are easy to customize. It will take only a couple of minutes to change the color, font, and size of the loaders. You can also change the animation speed. They have a very small file size compared to using GIF files.

The best way to appreciate how nice they are is to see the live preview on the description page.

5. Image Hover Effects Collection

This Image Hover Effects Collection kit was added fairly recently to CodeCanyon and comes with 20 different awesome CSS animation styles.

They follow a responsive design philosophy and support all major browsers. So you can rest assured that any effects you use on your website will look good on all devices and all screen sizes.

The animations are also fully customizable, and you can easily change the overlay and text colors for all animations to better align them with the overall theme of your own website.

The code is well documented, so it will be easier to make changes whenever necessary. You should definitely check out the live preview to see how good these hover animations are.

Free CSS Animation Libraries for 2021

Generally, you can expect these paid CSS animation libraries to have a lot of variety in the animations compared to free alternatives. They also come with free support for six months and lifetime updates.

Many times, these premium libraries also support old browsers. However, this might not be the case with free animation libraries.

It might be easier for anyone who is just starting out to simply use these paid libraries. However, if you don't have the budget to purchase these paid plugins, we have also listed some free alternatives below.

Here are four free CSS animation libraries that you can use in your projects:

SlipHover

This free image hover animation library only comes with basic sliding animations. The unique feature of this library is that the hover animations are aware of the cursor direction. So the overlay will appear to move in from the left side if the user hovers over the image from the left side.

animate.css

This animation library is not aimed at a specific use case like image hover animations or tooltips. It is simply a general-purpose library that you can use to animate different elements on a webpage. There are a bunch of classes that you can add to different elements to control the speed and delay of the animation.

imagehover.css

This library gives you the option to add simple image hover animations from different directions. It comes with 40 different hover animations.

loaders.css

This library consists of pure CSS-based loading animations. You can use them in your project if you are looking for some nice preloader animations.

Additional Resources

It can be hard to figure out where to start for an absolute beginner. We are listing some tutorials here which will make it easier for you to understand how CSS animations work and how you can start using them in your own projects.

You could start by reading this beginner-level introduction to CSS animation. After that, you should consider learning how to use CSS variables for animation.

• 
  CSS Animation
  A Beginner’s Introduction to CSS Animation
  Catalin Miron
• 
  Animation
  How to Use CSS Variables for Animation
  Dennis Gaebel

Using different pre-built CSS animation libraries is not hard at all. However, having a basic understanding of the concepts will go a long way when it comes to making changes to these animations or trying to create something of your own in future.

You should also consider reading a couple of tutorials that teach you how to create your own CSS-based animations from scratch. The first tutorial is for basic hover effects, while the second one is a quick tip for page loading animations. And here are some other great options:

• 
  Animation
  How to Use CSS Variables for Animation
  Dennis Gaebel
• 
  CSS Animation
  A Beginner’s Introduction to CSS Animation
  Catalin Miron
• 
  CSS
  How to Create 7 Different CSS Hover Effects From Scratch
  George Martsoukos
• 
  CSS Animation
  Enhance the Way a Web Page Loads With CSS Animations
  George Martsoukos
• 
  Animation
  10 Examples of Animation on CodePen You Can Learn From
  Donovan Hutchinson

Final Thoughts

Using a bit of animation for different elements on your website can make the content more interesting and engaging.

Coming up with our own unique animations from scratch can take some time. So we listed some of the best free and premium CSS-based animation libraries that will help you get started in no time.

New animations and effects are added all the time to CodeCanyon—you can choose one of the best-sellers or try something fresh and new!

This post has been updated with contributions from Franc Lucas. Franc is a writer for Envato Tuts+ who enjoys exploring the world of SaaS.