Top 8 Animated Video Makers for Beginners in 2023

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Top 8 Animated Video Makers for Beginners in 2023

Last Updated: 2022. 10. 24

Capturing people’s attention has never been harder these days. But, surprisingly animated videos can do it so easily. They trigger our childhood conditioning and make viewers love to see and listen to our messages conveyed in cartoons and animated videos.

However, not everyone has the professional skills and time to create stunning animated videos themselves.

But, no worries! In this post, we will be introducing you to the 8 best-value animated video makers. So, you can easily create eye-catching animated videos in minutes with no designing skills and experience needed.

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Line Cartoon Save The Date

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Here’s what you’ll learn:

1. FlexClip (Easy & Quick, Affordable)

2. Powtoon (Most Versatile)

3. Vyond (Modern)

4. Animaker (Studio-like)

5. Doodly (Best Whiteboard)

6. Toonly (Powerful Desktop App)

7. Renderforest (3D/2D Animation)

8. Biteable (Stylish)

Final Thoughts

Also, read top 7 animated text generators online.

1.FlexClip: Easy, Quick, and Most Affordable Animated Video Maker

Despite not being a professional animated video maker, FlexClip does offer you a wide array of animated characters, props, backgrounds, aesthetic illustrations, animated texts, etc. to choose from.

Create animated videos by FlexClip animated video maker online.

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What’s cool about it, apart from the animated characters and props, you can search for animated GIPHY GIFs and artistic illustrations to enhance your animation videos. All you need to do is go to its Elements Tab and select the animated elements and illustrations needed, and drag and drop to create a 2D animation video in minutes.

Besides, FlexClip also offers you designer-made and customizable animation video templates, covering school enrollment, back-to-school tips, stay-healthy advice, business workplace, animation slideshows, holiday celebrations, animated book reports, etc. So, you can easily piece them together with very little work.

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Online School Enrollment

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3d Animation Video

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Administration Office

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Stay Healthy And Safe

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Target Users: Students, teachers, computer novices, business professionals, freelancers, etc.

Pricing: Free to start; $9.99-29.99/month for 3 subscription plans (most affordable animated video makers of all)

Best Features

Designer-made templates with animated characters, props, animated texts, motion graphics, illustrations, etc.

Vast media library of royalty-free HD animation videos and music, SFX, and photos.

Dozens of video tools such as image background remover, screen & voiceover recorder, text animations, etc.

Intuitive timeline makes it easy for everyone to edit animated videos and photos.

5 video aspect ratios (16:9, 9:16, 1:1,4:5,21:9) for different media platforms.

Easy share to YouTube, Google Drive, Dropbox; clickable link and embed code are also available.

Limitations

Can't fully customize outfit, hair, or skin tone, facial expressions of animated characters

No advanced animation tools

2. Powtoon: Most Versatile Animated Video Maker

Powtoon is a leading online animated video maker that allows beginners with no graphic design knowledge and skills to create professional-looking animated videos in no time.

Use Powtoon to create professional animated videos

With an intuitive and stylish interface, you can easily select from hundreds of Powtoon’s pre-made animation templates and customize the scene, animated character, props and add royalty-free music from its music library and do the voiceover. Overall, it’s a powerhouse for making animated videos and content marketing.

Target Users: Content creator, marketer, students and teachers, corporate employees, etc.

Pricing: Free to start; $19-99/month for subscription plans; $4-10/month for the educational plan

Best Features

Create a wide array of animated videos: animated explainer, whiteboard video, build branded character, marketing video, animated infographic

Customize animated character’s details such as hair, outfit, emotion, motion, skin color, accessories, etc.

Screen & cam recording; record voiceovers for animated videos

Integrate with PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Hubspot, etc.

Hundreds of featured animated video templates covering varied fields

Easy-to-use interface

Horizontal, square, and vertical project modes for different platforms

Royalty-free music and objects

Limitations

Free users can’t download animated videos in MP4

No watermark-free for free users

3. Vyond: Animated Video Maker with Contemporary Characters

Vyond (or formally known as GoAnimate) is an amazing online animated video maker that helps you stay productive and attractive for marketing, corporate training, and E-learning, etc.

Create engaging animated videos for companies by Vyond

You can use Vyond’s full-customizable animated characters, prop, charts, texts to create unique animation for your company’s employees and easily make your storytelling engaging and even improve the working or studying relationship between coworkers and students.

Target Users: HR, teachers, salespersons, YouTubers, etc.

Pricing: $49-159/month for essential, premium, and professional plans

Best Features

Use timeline feature to arrange all the animated elements for the video

3 categories for animated characters: business-friendly, whiteboard, and contemporary

Lots of pre-made animation templates

Customize animated characters’ facial expressions, direction, action, etc.

Record voiceovers for individual characters

Auto text to speech and automatic lip-sync feature for animated characters

Free trial for 14 days

Limitations

Lack of trending topics for animations

A bit pricy for freelancers

It may take a while for beginners to get used to the timeline controls

4. Animaker: For Studio-like Animations

Promoting the idea of "Do-it-yourself", Animaker is a cloud-based animation-making platform that helps non-designers and beginners to create studio-like animated videos and live-action videos like a no-brainer.

Create studio-like animations by Animaker

You can toggle between Full and Lite mode to select the editing interface that works best for you. In the Full Mode, you can control the animation timeline, video timeline, and camera timeline and add templates, animated characters, props and texts, videos, and audio from its asset library.

While the Lite mode offers you a much simpler storyboard view to edit all the animated elements, etc. All the elements in a screen are fully customizable with tons of amazing animation effects.

Target Users: Avid 2D animation fans, YouTubers, students, teachers, corporates for an animated character for branding, non-designers, etc.

Pricing: $20-79/month for different subscription plans

Best Features

Full and Lite editing modes for different users

Extensive actions and facial expressions for 2D animated characters and different scenes

Auto lip-sync features for vivid voiceovers

100 million+ stock assets

Special effects, together with props, make animations come alive

Integration with Zoom, Google Drive, Dropbox, Pexels

Download 4K videos and easy share to dozens of social platforms

Limitations

Some of the props are only graphics without moving actions

Full editing modes can be a bit overwhelming for beginners

5. Doodly: Best Whiteboard Animated Video Maker

Doodly is an extremely popular and prestigious animation maker, specializing in creating whiteboard animated videos. Its iconic style is an animated artist hand showing the drawing path of an animated character.

Iconic drawing hands of whiteboard animations by Doodly

Besides, Doodly is a desktop app that needs to be downloaded and installed on your PC. You can upload your image and add control points to tell Doodly how to follow the drawing path and create the classic Doodly whiteboard drawing. It's an affordable and straightforward whiteboard animation software for vintage or classic whiteboard animated videos.

Target Users: Whiteboard animation fans, business professionals, teachers, filmmakers, etc.

Pricing: Standard $39/month; enterprise $69/month

Best Features

Import photos and create a custom drawing path

Automatic align the duration of your drawings to the duration of the scene

Easily create offline animated videos and upload to Clouds for storage

Limitations

Limited assets in the library if you don't upgrade plans or buy Doodly rainbow

Can't do voiceovers or lip-sync while creating animated characters in Doodly

Not that accurate for the drawing paths for the fonts

6. Toonly: Powerful Desktop Animated Video Maker

Unlike the online animated video makers above, Toonly is a powerful desktop animation application on your PC. It might sound surprising to you that Toonly was created by the team of highly regarded whiteboard animation maker--Doodly.

Create funny animated videos by Toonly

You can instantly preview the animation effects added in Toonly on the timeline. Essentially, the Toonly is a desktop app to create animated video explainers for business or teaching.

Target Users: Professional animators,salespersons, business professionals, YouTubers, etc.

Pricing: Standard $ 39/month; enterprise $69/month

Best Features

Use timeline mode for animation editing

Lip-sync feature

Seamless transitions for an individual animated character to multiple actions in one scene

Has key-frame feature to move an object for different motions in a scene

Limitations

No trial version is available for the free users

Don't have pre-made animation templates

No trial version is available for the free users

Limited animation style and characters until users upgrade to enterprise plans to expand characters, props, backgrounds in the library

Characters look robotic while doing lip-sync because there is no way to add extra motion to the character

No way to import clips to make live videos combined with real persons and animated ones

7. Renderforest: 3D/2D Animated Video Maker

Renderforest is an all-in-one online video platform that helps you create animations, intros and logos, and slideshow presentations and music visualizations for branding and promo. Besides, Renderforest is one of the few online animated video makers that offer awesome 3D animation templates for animation creation. Sound cool?

Create 3D animated videos by Renderforest’s premade templates

The logic and working interface of Renderforest completely focus on beginners who are not pro animators and have limited time for creating animations from the scratch. You choose an animation template and customize the text, style and color, and music and finally preview and export the animated videos. That's it.

Target Users: Teachers, sales, students, freelancers, etc.

Pricing: Free to start; $19.99-59.99/month for different subscriptions

Best Features

Easy-to-use storyboard mode for non-designers and beginners

Tons of 3D and 2D animated video templates and trendy templates for business promo, etc.

Use AI to generate the number of scenes for you if you put scripts to start making animated videos

Matching scene features to recommend alternatives

Vast music library

Directly do or upload voiceovers to animated videos

Limitations

Can't customize the details of an animated character, prop or scene, etc.

No whiteboard animation templates

Pick one color palette and it will be applied to all scenes. Quick but not ideal for customization

No lip-sync feature for animated characters

8. Biteable: Stylish Animated Video Maker

With a stylish and colorful animevibe homepage, Biteable is an easy and quick animated video maker. It offers you plenty of 3D and 2D pre-made animation templates for you to choose from and customize yours.

Quickly create compelling animated videos by Biteable

You can customize texts, ribbon and background color and trim the duration of pre-made animation, and add the different motions for the enter and exit of text and animation, etc. That's it. Pretty simple.

Target Users: Students, teachers, business professionals, freelancers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc.

Pricing: Free to start; $29-99/month for plus and ultimate plans respectively

Best Features

A wide array of 3D and 2D pre-designed animation templates across many industries and with multiple aspect ratios

Use Timeline for editing

Easy-to-use interface

Limitations

Can't customize the details of an animated character like hair color, facial expressions, body moments, outfits, including props, etc.

Not watermark-free for free users

Lack of features: only a few transitions, limited styles, etc.

No visible undo button

Now, It's Your Move

So, which animated video maker makes sense to you both for its features and price tag? If you only want to quickly make an animated video for promo or video explainer, then FlexClip could be a great choice as it is the most affordable and only watermark-free animated video maker for free users in this list.

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Frank /

Passionate about photography, video-making and travel, Frank is a seasoned copywriter and a beloved father of 2-year-old daughter at FlexClip. He is always keen to share his latest discovery about video marketing and tricks to relive your memories through videos and images.