Kario vs After Effects: when to brief an agent and when to keyframe by hand

Kario Team · September 28, 2026 · 2 min read

After Effects and Kario both end in a composition of layers and keyframes. The difference is who builds it. In After Effects, you create the comp, set the type, place every keyframe and shape every curve. In Kario, you describe the shot, Kario builds the comp, and you edit it the way you would in After Effects, or with a note in the chat.

The video above is a title shot Kario built for Corvane Arc headphones, then the comp behind it.

What happens in it

• The finished shot first: a camera push, a focus pull, three callouts drawn off a null, and a title rising through a track matte.
• Then the comp in Kario Studio: Camera, Title, Matte, Null – callouts and Product on the timeline, each with its keyframes.
• The Title's clip is dragged 0.6 seconds later on the timeline, so it lands after the callouts.
• Its first Position keyframe gets a heavier ease-out, by pulling the curve's out handle.
• A note in the chat, "Widen the shot so the battery label stays in", rewrites only the camera's keyframes: the push now ends at 1.05× instead of 1.18×.

What carries over from After Effects

Compositions and precomps, layers, nulls and parenting, keyframes on transform, opacity, fill, stroke, trim paths, text, effects and the camera, a bezier curve editor per keyframe, track mattes, a 3D camera with depth of field, and effects such as glows, blurs, particles and motion blur. The After Effects alternative page lists each one and how it maps.

What Kario doesn't do

• Tracking and keying. Kario separates people from the background, so a title can sit behind a speaker, but it doesn't track motion or key green screen.
• Drawn masks and expressions. Kario has track mattes and constraints, but no drawn masks and no expression language.
• After Effects plugins and projects. It doesn't run third-party plugins or scripts, or open .aep files.

Where Kario is the better tool

• The first pass. Kario plans the scenes, sets the type and keyframes every layer from a brief, your URL or your screenshots.
• Notes in a sentence. "Hold the price card half a second longer" or "use our blue" changes those layers and nothing else.
• Several shapes of one video. 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 and 4:5 come as boards in one project, each laid out for its frame.