You have a page to build and you want it to move like it was expensive. Here is every honest path — including the ones where you should not pick us.
shadcn/ui itself is excellent and free, and we mean that as a customer: our own patterns install through the same registry, keyless. The block shops built on top of it — shadcnblocks and its kin — sell volume: well over a thousand layout sections (heroes, pricing grids, FAQs, dashboards), lifetime plans from around $149 at the time of writing. What none of them sell is motion. A block hands you a static section and wishes you luck; the scroll choreography, the entrance sequence, the WebGL backdrop are your problem, on your deadline.
Motion Menu starts where blocks stop: every pattern is the motion — working HTML/CSS/JS you can watch run in the catalogue before you take a line of it, with React, Vue, Svelte and vanilla TypeScript wrappers already generated. Use both. Blocks for the layout volume, Motion Menu for the parts that make the page feel authored.
Choose the block shops if — you are assembling dashboard CRUD and marketing sections at speed, and nothing on the page needs to move.
Choose us if — the page has to perform: a hero with presence, scroll storytelling, transitions between routes. Take the library free.
Framer gives you motion in a canvas with hosting attached, billed monthly, forever. Templates give you a finished look someone else already shipped four hundred times. Both are legitimate — if what you want is a marketing one-pager this week and you will never need to leave their walls. The trade is ownership: the design lives in their editor, the exports are constrained, and your site is only as portable as they permit.
Motion Menu patterns are code that lands in your repository, in your stack, and once transplanted they are your code — that clause is in the terms, front and centre. There is nothing to rent: the library is free, and if you ever want the whole site built instead, our build service prices the job once, up front, with the delivery date set before your brief lands.
Choose Framer if — a non-technical team needs to edit a one-pager themselves and monthly rent is fine.
Choose us if — your product or site is code, motion is part of the brand, and you want to own what ships.
The engines are free — GSAP has been 100% free for commercial use since Webflow opened it up in 2025, and Three.js is MIT. So this is not a licence argument; we won't pretend it is. The cost of DIY is craft-time: the easing curve that feels expensive instead of bouncy, resize and mobile performance, reduced-motion fallbacks, scroll coordination, teardown on route change. A senior developer's first bespoke hero takes days. Their tenth takes hours — which is exactly the knowledge each Motion Menu pattern encodes. Read the source, steal the technique, ship the same afternoon. If you later outgrow a pattern, you already understand it well enough to rewrite it.
Choose DIY if — you need one truly bespoke signature effect, you have the weeks, and the craft is the point.
Choose us if — you need the same thirty recurring moves done properly, on a deadline, every project.
There is a fifth option nobody prices: generate the page and accept what comes out. It is recognisable on sight — a centered hero with two buttons, three icon cards in a row, numbered steps, the same skeleton under every brand. It reads as placeholder because, structurally, it is. Motion Menu exists for the teams who noticed. Authored motion — the entrance, the scroll rhythm, the transition out — is the fastest way to make a page feel deliberately made rather than assembled, and it is the one layer the generators still can't fake.
No tool belongs everywhere, and pretending otherwise is how comparison pages lie. Don't use Motion Menu:
Dense admin dashboards. People live in these eight hours a day; decorative motion is friction. Use plain shadcn blocks — that is what they are for.
Accessibility-critical surfaces. Where any motion is a liability — medical, some gov, kiosk — ship static and be proud of it.
Native apps. We are web. SwiftUI and Compose animation are other crafts.
When you need a full design system. We are the motion layer, not a design system — pair us with one; don't replace one with us.
Browse the entire library free — every pattern runs live in the catalogue, no card, no key. And when you'd rather have it done than build it: Plinth — a page for $600 in 3 days, a site for $1,200 in 5, a flagship for $2,400 in 10. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed date, from the people who made the library.