SVGA vs Lottie vs VAP vs PAG for Gift Animations

Four animation formats show up again and again in live-streaming and voice chat apps: SVGA, Lottie, VAP and PAG. They all play an animation over the app, but they store it in very different ways — and that decides the file size, the effects you can use, whether there is sound and which players you need. This comparison of SVGA vs Lottie vs VAP vs PAG is written for teams choosing a format for gift animations: the full-screen presents, entry effects, avatar frames and banners users pay for.

The four formats at a glance

SVGA

An SVGA file stores the bitmap pieces of an animation once, plus instructions for where each piece sits on every frame. A player draws the frames on the device, so the background stays transparent and the file stays small: across the 2,810 SVGA files in this store, the median is well under 100 KB, and only the biggest full-screen gifts reach a few megabytes. SVGA can carry sound, and named layers can be swapped at run time to show a user's avatar or name.

It is the default format of most gift systems in live and voice apps, with players on Android, iOS, Flutter and the web. The trade-off: effects that can't be expressed as moving, scaling and fading pieces have to be baked into the images. More in What is an SVGA file?

Lottie

A Lottie file is JSON: it describes vector shapes and how they move, exported from After Effects with the Bodymovin plugin. For flat vector art — an icon, a loader, a check mark — Lottie files are tiny and razor-sharp at any size, and the players are mature and everywhere.

For gifts it is a weaker fit. Rich, glowing, particle-heavy art either can't be exported or becomes a large file that is slow to render on budget phones, and Lottie has no sound. Use it for interface motion; use one of the other three for gifts.

VAP

VAP (Video Animation Player) is Tencent's answer to effects that are too complex for sprite formats. A VAP file is an ordinary MP4: each frame holds the colour image and its alpha side by side, and a small config tells the player how to combine them. Because it is video, anything you can render works — dense particles, fluids, 3D renders, real footage — at a file size that doesn't grow with complexity.

The costs: video decoding uses more power than drawing sprites, short clips are often larger than the equivalent SVGA, and the art is fixed at the resolution it was rendered at. VAP is the right tool for the most spectacular full-screen gifts and entrances. This store sells VAP files too — mostly VIP cards and rocket effects.

PAG

A PAG file is exported straight from After Effects by Tencent's PAG exporter and played by libpag. It keeps most of what a designer builds — vector shapes, images, text layers, masks and many effects — in a compact binary, and text layers can be changed at run time, which suits gifts that show a user's name.

PAG fits teams that design in After Effects and don't want to simplify their work for a sprite format. The trade-offs are a larger runtime library than SVGA's and gift ecosystems that expect .svga. See how to open a PAG file on Android.

Which format should you use for gifts?

• Most gifts, entry effects, frames and banners: SVGA. It is small, fast to play, supports sound and dynamic names and avatars, and works on every platform live apps ship on.

• Your heaviest full-screen gifts: VAP. When a gift is all particles, fire, water or 3D, video beats sprites on both quality and size.

• After Effects-first teams: PAG. Especially when animations rely on effects or text you change at run time.

• Lottie: for the interface, not the gifts. Loaders, icons and onboarding.

Many apps mix formats: SVGA for the everyday gift tray, a few VAP showpieces at the top of it, Lottie in the UI. Whatever you choose, test each file before you ship it — the free viewer plays SVGA, PAG and VAP files in the browser and shows their canvas, frame rate and length.

Ready-made gift animations in SVGA, PAG and VAP

SVGA Store sells 4,500+ files for live-streaming and voice chat apps — 2,810 SVGA, 708 PAG and 53 VAP among them. Start with SVGA gift animations, entry effects or avatar frames, or browse everything and filter by format. Every file plays on its page before you buy.