What's the most creative thing you've built with Webflow GSAP?

One year after Webflow made GSAP free, we asked developers what they actually built with it

A little over a year has passed since Webflow made GSAP a free, native part of the platform. Jacob Kastelic from Flowout asked the r/webflow community a simple question: are people actually shipping sites with real GSAP animations now, or has the free access mostly gone unused? The answers ranged from fully custom AI generated code to hybrid workflows mixing native GSAP, classic interactions, and hand written scripts. Here is what developers told him.

Johan van Wambeke, Founder of Wambay.com

The first thing I built was one of those fake chat interactions, the kind where it looks like two people are talking in WhatsApp but it is really just HTML. There were two or three things I always wanted to build, and I did them in the first week. The interactions panel was essential to get the courage. Webflow took another skill and made it accessible that day. Now I use a lot of AI, but I still put the result into the Designer to be able to tweak it.

Isaac Farrow, Co-Founder and Webflow Developer at Whatifweb.co.nz

It is good for simple interactions and animations, but Webflow's native UI seems to be missing half the plugins GSAP actually offers, so we often get Claude to write custom code instead. We also use Relume components, and they all still use IX2, so we often end up defaulting back to that anyway. That said, we did take part in a few of Webflow's GSAP challenges when they first took over GSAP.

Neil McDermott, Co-Founder at Easiserv.com

We are using a mixture of the new GSAP animations in Webflow and custom code from Claude. The animations in Webflow do not feel as easy to use as the old Webflow animations at first, but once you get used to it, and there are some great tutorials and a course from Formbug that acts like the missing manual for Webflow GSAP, they are really powerful, if still a little fiddly. We are currently exploring whether to build a library of animations we use regularly, like fade ins and text scroll, in Webflow and tie them to our Lumos components, or do the same with custom code from Claude.

Nikolay Panayotov, CEO and Webflow Expert at htmlBurger.com

GSAP was already one of the best JavaScript animation libraries long before the acquisition, so having it become a first class citizen in Webflow was a huge win. We use it on most of our custom Webflow builds, from subtle scroll reveals to more advanced timelines and interactive experiences.

What impressed me most was not just that Webflow made GSAP free, but how they integrated it. The visual UI makes timelines, triggers, and properties much easier to understand, especially for designers who are not comfortable writing GSAP from scratch. You can build a lot visually, and when you need something more advanced, you can still drop into code and use the full GSAP API. To me, that is one of the better examples of a visual builder enhancing a powerful developer tool instead of oversimplifying it.

Shreyansh Kotak, Lead UI/UX Designer at Perpetual

My team has been using GSAP a lot more now that it is possible to build interactions directly within the Webflow canvas. That said, a lot of us still end up using classic Webflow interactions, mostly out of muscle memory and because component libraries like Relume still rely on them. We recently shipped a few microsites for a client using a hybrid approach, combining Webflow's native GSAP interactions, custom GSAP code, and classic Webflow interactions.

One thing we ran into with this setup is that when managing interactions, you have to select either Webflow native interactions or GSAP interactions. Both work, but the layers panel will not show the other type until you switch to it. If you are in classic interactions, you do not see a visual indicator of layers using GSAP interactions, and the reverse is true too.

Ethan Suero, Web Designer & Webflow Expert

I use GSAP in all my Webflow sites, and all of them are custom code with Claude. I found this works much better and lets me move a lot faster than dealing with the native UI, since the latest IX3 never worked well for me. I host all my JS code externally, so I can update scripts in a single file and see the changes live without having to publish every time, which is a much better workflow. One of our recent projects won Awwwards Site of the Day, and we used a ton of scroll trigger animations on it.

Vikas Pasi, Developer at BlitzStudio.xyz

I have started using GSAP on almost every project now. Nothing too crazy, mostly smooth scroll animations, section reveals, and small interactions that make the site feel more polished. I think the biggest change is that it helps websites feel more alive without overdoing it. It has definitely become part of my normal Webflow workflow.

A year in, the split is not really native GSAP versus custom code. It is how much a project leans on AI to write and maintain that code, and how well a team's existing component library, from Relume to Client First to Lumos, plays with whichever approach they pick.