9 Best GIF Makers of 2026

Canva treats GIFs as one more export of its design editor, which is why it suits people who want a polished animated graphic rather than a raw clip. Its GIF maker page describes two routes: upload a video, trim it and add captions, or arrange a set of photos in order and save them as a single GIF. Any element on the canvas can be given a motion style with the Animate option, and the library adds static and animated stickers, frames and effects. The free plan, listed at US$0, includes more than 1.6 million templates and 4.7 million elements; Pro, at US$144 per year for one person, raises that to 3.6 million templates and 141 million elements and adds premium AI tools. The trade-off is control: Canva's GIF page does not document frame timing, palette or dithering settings, and some animations are premium. People who need pixel-level frame editing will do better with Ezgif, Photopea or Aseprite. We compared documented features and published prices.

Ezgif is the workhorse GIF editor of the web: a free set of single-purpose tools rather than one design app. Its video converter accepts MP4, WebM, AVI, MOV, MKV and many more formats up to 200MB, or a direct video URL, and lets you pick start and end times, frame rate, loop count and the encoder. In October 2026 Ezgif made ezgif-hq the default encoder, using perceptual color quantization and adaptive per-frame palettes. After conversion, the output can be resized, cropped, rotated, reversed, sped up, optimized, captioned or censored, and a local processing option keeps files in your browser. The limits are documented: clips can run 60 seconds at 5 fps and only 30 seconds at 10 fps, so longer or smoother GIFs need a desktop tool like Gifski. There are no templates or stickers, which keeps it fast but plain. We compared documented features and published prices.

Gifski does one job, turning video into GIFs, and its documentation focuses on quality. It uses pngquant to build palettes with temporal dithering, which the developer says can reach thousands of colors per frame, and it supports lossy LZW compression, temporal smoothing and denoising. The Mac app from Sindre Sorhus adds trimming, cropping, exact dimensions, speed, loop delay and a bounce mode, and it outputs up to 50 FPS. A Windows GUI and command-line builds are also free. The limits are stated plainly: the Mac listing says Gifski is a converter, not a GIF creator, and will never support adding text, and the site warns that default output files are large, so you lower width, frame rate or quality to fit upload limits. Still-image GIFs need the CLI and ffmpeg. We compared documented features and published prices.

Kapwing's GIF maker sits inside a full browser video editor, which helps when a GIF is one cut of a larger video project. You can start from a video, a set of images or an existing GIF, then trim, crop, overlay, reorder and resize on a timeline, add filters, text and stickers, and export a high-definition GIF with adjustable compression. The free plan allows unlimited exports with a watermark, 2 GB uploads and 720p video. Pro starts at $16 per member per month on annual billing or $24 monthly, and removes the watermark, raises uploads to 6 GB and adds 4K export and 1,000 credits a month for AI tools. Team features such as shared folders and real-time collaboration are the main reason to choose it over Ezgif. For a single quick conversion, the watermark and per-member pricing make free tools a better fit. We compared documented features and published prices.

Photopea brings Photoshop-style layer editing to the browser, and its documentation explains a simple animation system. Any layer whose name starts with _a_ becomes a frame when you export to GIF, PNG or WEBP, and adding a comma and a number to the name sets the delay, so _a_dog,500 shows for half a second. Layers without the prefix, such as a background or watermark, stay visible in every frame. Opening an existing GIF, APNG or WebP converts every frame into a named layer, which makes it easy to delete, reorder or resize frames, and a Merge command combines several animations into one. Because files are processed on your own device and the editor supports PSD, masks and adjustment layers, it works well for drawn or illustrated frames. The naming system is less visual than a timeline, so beginners may prefer Canva. We compared documented features and published prices.

Aseprite is the pick when a GIF starts as a drawing rather than a video. It is a pixel-art editor with a real animation timeline: layers, frames and cels can be created, copied, linked and dragged, onion skinning shows neighbouring frames while you draw, and frame tags let one file hold several animations that loop forward, in reverse or ping-pong. Drawing tools are tuned for pixel art, with pixel-perfect strokes, a shading ink and RotSprite rotation that avoids distortion on tiny sprites. Finished work saves as an animated GIF, a PNG sequence or a sprite sheet with JSON data, and a command-line interface can automate conversions. On Steam's US store it costs $19.99 once, with updates for the v1.x series. It does not import video, so it is not a converter, and its tools suit pixel art more than painted or photographic frames. We compared documented features and published prices.

GIPHY is first a GIF search engine, and its GIF Maker is designed to feed that library. On the web you can upload JPG, PNG, GIF, MP4, MOV or WebM files, or paste a link from YouTube, Vimeo and other sites, then decorate the result with captions, filters and stickers. A separate sticker maker accepts JPG or PNG images. In the mobile app, you press and hold the shutter to record a GIF, add a caption, trim with the scissors tool and upload. Uploads need a signed-in account and can carry up to 20 tags and be set public or private, and published GIFs share to Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and other apps. The app is free on the US App Store. What it lacks is control: GIPHY does not document frame rate, palette or size settings, so creators who care about output quality should export from Ezgif or Gifski and upload the finished file. We compared documented features and published prices.

Imgflip is built around memes, and its GIF maker is one of the quickest ways to put text on a clip. You choose Video to GIF or Images to GIF, upload a file or paste a URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Giphy and other sites, then add text, images, stickers and drawings, with a time range slider controlling when each appears. A motion option lets captions follow objects in a video GIF. The free tier has clear limits on the Pro comparison page: video GIFs are capped at 160 frames, 360x360 pixels and 24 second segments, and output carries a small imgflip.com watermark. Pro lifts those to 1,600 frames, unlimited dimensions and 240 seconds, removes the watermark and adds sound on GIFs. The page lists Pro at 11.95 per month billed yearly without naming a currency, so we mark the price as pending. We compared documented features and published prices.

LICEcap from Cockos is the simplest way to turn a piece of your screen into a GIF. You place a frame over part of the desktop, press record and it writes straight to .GIF, or to Cockos's own .LCF format, which the company says compresses better and keeps more than 256 colors per frame. You can move the frame during capture, pause with a shift+space hotkey, insert text messages, add a title frame, show elapsed time and record mouse clicks, and a maximum frame rate setting limits CPU use. It is GPL free software with source in every download, and the installers are under 1MB. The weak points are age and editing: the current v1.32 shipped on June 8, 2022, macOS support is listed up to version 12, and there is no editor after recording, so trims and captions happen in Ezgif or Photopea. We compared documented features and published prices.