Pro-grade tools that cost nothing
You don't need a big budget to level up your After Effects work. These free plugins deliver broadcast-quality results — from cinematic energy effects to precision workflow helpers — and they're the ones working motion designers keep installed on every machine. We've picked the standouts that are genuinely free, not trials in disguise.
12 hand-picked plugins
See all After Effects plugins
by Video Copilot
Saber is a free After Effects plug-in from Video Copilot for creating energy beams, lightsabers, lasers, portals, neon lights, electric, and haze effects. It includes 50 presets and works with dynamic text and mask outlines.
by Motion Bro
Motion Bro is a preset extension for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro offering over 10,000 ready-to-use presets including transitions, motion design scenes, graphic elements, overlays, sound FX and face tools, applied with one click.
by Plugin Everything
Quick Chromatic Aberration 3 is a free After Effects plugin that adds RGB shift and distortion to emulate the chromatic aberration produced by real lenses, with GPU-accelerated, 32bpc processing and per-channel control.
by Plugin Everything
Displacer Pro is a free, GPU-accelerated displacement map plugin for After Effects. It handles displacement with translation, rotation and scale, plus modes like hue, saturation and luma, working in 32bpc.
by Salt Media
BlenderAe2 by Salt Media transfers 3D data and objects between Blender and After Effects in both directions, covering vertices, 3D layer transforms, camera data and layer synchronization.
by Baskl.ai
CorridorKey brings Corridor Digital's CorridorKey to After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, and Premiere Pro through a plugin implementation for easy use. Currently at version 1.3.0, it ranks among the most popular entries on aescripts.
by Pixel Sorter Studio
Pixel Sorter 4 is a pixel-sorting plugin for After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro from Pixel Sorter Studio. It creates glitch art, digital artifacts and sorted-pixel effects with constraint masks, stretch mode and animation controls.
by Brennan Chapman
True Comp Duplicator for After Effects creates a complete duplicate of selected comp hierarchies, including subcomps. It offers many options, from setting a depth limit to updating expressions and filtering which items get duplicated with regex.
by Plugin Everything
Plugin Everything Deep Glow generates a physically accurate glow inside After Effects, simulating inverse-square falloff for correct results even in non-linear color spaces. It is GPU accelerated and includes compositing controls to refine each glow.
by Towards Inner Momentum
Chromabba is a chromatic aberration plugin for After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro that simulates how light bends around edges rather than just shifting RGB channels. It can also produce a liquid glass distortion effect.
by Mike Overbeck
EaseCopy is an After Effects script from Mike Overbeck that copies and pastes keyframe eases without overwriting your values, and copies and pastes values without overwriting your eases. It supports keyboard shortcuts and KBAR.
by Pixel Sorter Studio
Motion Mosh brings datamosh-esque aesthetics in realtime to After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, and Premiere Pro. GPU accelerated with real interaction and no export/import workflow, it now works with Premiere Pro and Media Encoder too.
