Most people looking for a Plainly alternative are really deciding between two things: keep the work inside After Effects and run it on machines you control, or move the work into a cloud service that builds videos in its own editor. Everything else on the shortlist is a variation on that choice. We make Templater, so we sit on one side of it, and we will say so as we go. We will also say where the other side is the better fit.
This guide explains what Plainly is, lays out the realistic options, and gives you a way to choose based on what you already own. If you already have After Effects templates, one set of answers applies. If you have none and no motion designer, a different set does.
What Plainly is, and what it asks of you
Plainly describes itself as a video automation platform for After Effects. You upload After Effects templates, connect a data source, and the videos render and distribute automatically. That is the whole pitch, and it is a clean one.
The template work stays in After Effects. You build the project the way you always have, then upload it. Plainly scans the project and detects the parameters it finds on its own, and you can also mark the dynamic elements yourself: text, images, video, animation and audio. Plainly says an After Effects plugin can upload templates directly, so you do not have to leave the application to publish a new version.
The rendering does not happen on your computer. In Plainly’s words, it “uses a cloud-based After Effects infrastructure to render your videos.” You send the job, and their servers do the work. For a lot of teams that is the entire attraction, because nobody has to babysit a render machine.
Data comes in several ways. Plainly lists CSV files, its own API, and native integrations, including one-click integrations that transfer and automatically distribute finished videos. It also has a page for Google Sheets, a page for its video editing API, and options for custom output formats and encoding.
On cost, Plainly’s plans include a set number of rendering minutes. There is no limit on the number of videos, but the output is capped by the rendering minutes in your plan, and concurrency depends on the plan too. They offer a 14-day free trial and describe themselves as an Adobe Video Technology Partner. For actual prices, see their pricing page. We are not going to guess at them here.
Read that description once more and notice what it assumes. It assumes you have, or can build, After Effects templates. It assumes you are happy to rent rendering time rather than own it. If both are true, Plainly is a reasonable place to start, and you should try it. If one of them is false, the alternatives below start to make more sense.
So why look elsewhere at all? The reasons we hear are practical ones. A team wants the rendering to happen on its own hardware, maybe because the footage is sensitive or because the volume makes owning machines sensible. A team wants a different pricing shape, such as software they license rather than minutes they buy. Or a team never wanted After Effects in the loop at all, and a developer would rather call an API with JSON. Each of those reasons points to a different alternative.
Option one: Templater inside your own After Effects
The first alternative keeps everything Plainly keeps, which is the After Effects template, and changes where the work runs. Templater is an After Effects plugin. You rig a template inside After Effects, pair it with a data source, and render the versions on a machine you own or rent. Nothing is uploaded to a platform. The project file, the footage and the finished videos stay with you.
The word “rig” is the key one. Rigging means telling Templater which layers in your composition are dynamic and which columns or fields in your data feed them. Once the rig exists, one template becomes many videos. A text layer takes a name. An image layer takes a photo from a link or a local folder. Footage layers take clips, local or cloud-based. Colors can change too.
Data can arrive from a Google Sheet, from a tab-separated file exported out of Excel, Numbers or Sheets, or from a JSON file or feed. One limit is worth knowing before you plan around it. Templater does not read an Excel file directly, so you export it to a tab-delimited file first. It also pulls from one data source at a time, and it maps to a single worksheet within a Google Sheet.
Templater comes in three editions, and the editions are really three roles.
Rig is for the artist who prepares the project. You map data to composition layers and preview how the layers change as the data is processed. It is also what you want if you plan to sell or hand out a Templater-ready template.
Pro adds the batch step. It can batch render, or batch replicate, the master composition once per row of data. Replicate saves a copy of the project for each version, which lets you do hand finishing before rendering, or send the copies to the After Effects render queue or Adobe Media Encoder. Media Encoder matters when you need an output codec After Effects does not include.
Bot removes the person from the loop. It watches the data source, and when new data shows up it starts the customization and render by itself. It also takes commands from a command line, and it runs as a background process on very large data sets. If a web app or mobile app is going to ask for videos on demand, Bot is the edition you are looking at.
Beyond the basics, a few features exist because real batches break in predictable ways. Layout rules adjust dynamic layers relative to their container and their neighbors, so a long name does not run off the edge. Time Sculpting trims, shifts and stretches layers so footage of varying length still fits the design. Text from any language goes into your sheet and shows up in your text layers, and right-to-left scripts are supported as long as your installed fonts have the glyphs. You can name each output file from the data source, and you can even switch between project templates row by row.
Now the honest part, because this option has real costs.
You need After Effects. Templater is a plugin, so Adobe’s application has to be installed and running wherever the work happens. Templater supports After Effects from CS5 through 2025, on macOS and on Windows. If nobody on your team uses After Effects today, you are buying two things, not one.
You also own the render capacity. Rendering time depends on the length of each video, the resolution, your hardware, the effects in the template and how the template is built. Our own advice for estimating is a pre-flight: render one video that looks like the rest of the batch on a machine like your production machine, then multiply by the number of videos. When one machine is not enough, you can run several machines with Bot in parallel, and two machines cut the total time in half, three cut it to a third. That is arithmetic, but it also means you are the one adding machines.
And Templater does not come with a front end. There is no web form or customer-facing app out of the box. We designed Bot so developers can build whatever interface they need on top of it, with documentation to match, and we can help if you lack the staff. Still, if you were hoping for a finished dashboard where a marketer clicks a button, that is not what you get from Templater alone. Our companion app QUE fills part of that gap with a cloud data source, an API, a Zapier integration and a dashboard that shows job status and how busy your rendering machines are. QUE sends jobs to what it calls satellites, which are computers running After Effects and Templater. QUE does not balance load across satellites for you. You assign jobs to them yourself, and every font, plugin and asset the job needs has to be installed on the satellite you pick.
A related app, Projector, handles rendering and delivery on a single machine. It renders several customized videos at once, based on the number of cores, and it can transcode as part of each job. It can also send finished videos to Vimeo, JW Player or Frame.io, archive to AWS S3, and read its data from Google Sheets or QUE. Projector runs as a local desktop application, and Dataclay’s description of it is that your assets are never visible to another party, including us.
What if you want cloud scale but still want Templater? That works. You can run Templater on Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services. We do not require a special Templater license for it. The catch comes from Adobe. After Effects has to be installed and running on that cloud machine, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not permit After Effects on a server, so you need to talk to an Adobe salesperson to get the right license. We have written more about the on-premise side of this tradeoff in our post on why on-prem matters for video automation.
On licensing and trying it, there is a 30-day free trial that includes the full Bot feature set, and a refund is available within 30 days of purchase if it turns out Templater does not suit you. A Standard license activates on one machine at a time. A Floating license can be shared across machines on a network through a licensing server, one user at a time. For the details, our Templater licensing guide walks through the fit. Prices live on our licensing page.
Option two: cloud API tools that build templates in their own editors
The second kind of alternative gives up After Effects as the design tool. Instead, you build the template inside the vendor’s own editor, and your code or your no-code automations ask the service to render it. Two names come up most often, Creatomate and Shotstack. We have read what each says about itself, and what follows sticks to that.
Creatomate calls itself “the creative automation platform for developers and no-code users.” It generates videos and images from templates, or straight from JSON, through a REST API or through no-code automation. It also does bulk generation from spreadsheets and offers a JavaScript Preview SDK.
Templates are built in Creatomate’s online Template Editor. Its homepage does not mention After Effects or importing from it, so if your existing assets live in After Effects projects, plan on rebuilding them in the editor rather than uploading them. That is not a flaw so much as a different starting point. A designer who has never opened After Effects can work in a browser editor. A designer with years of After Effects templates has a lot of rebuilding to do.
The API call is simple to picture. You send a POST request to the renders endpoint with a template ID and a list of modifications, such as text, colors and media URLs, authenticated with a Bearer API key. You can also generate a video from JSON with no template at all. For people who do not write code, Creatomate lists no-code automation with thousands of apps, shows Airtable as a trigger, and has guides for Zapier, Make, Pabbly and n8n. Data can come from Airtable records, CSV import and export for bulk replacement of images, videos and captions, JSON through the API, or shareable forms. Outputs include MP4, JPG and animated GIF. There is a free trial of 50 credits that needs no card, and other prices are on its pricing page.
Shotstack describes a cloud video editing platform offered as an API, plus a white-label editor SDK that you can embed in your own product and brand as yours. It does programmatic editing and rendering in the cloud, bulk generation from templates, and AI video generation. Its listed use cases include automated social highlight reels, sports highlights, personalized videos with merge fields, and listing videos for real estate and automotive.
Its templates are designed visually and then converted to code. Shotstack’s own line is that you can design dynamic templates with AI, turn them into code, and render videos at scale with the API. It lists JSON Templates, Studio Templates and Workflow Templates and Modules. Like Creatomate, its homepage does not mention After Effects. It offers SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby, a free sandbox that needs no card, and prices on its pricing page. Shotstack also says more than 20,000 businesses and developers in 119 countries use it, which is its claim, not something we have checked.
The editor SDK is the piece that sets Shotstack apart from the other options in this guide. If your goal is to give your own customers a video editor inside your own app, an embeddable, white-label editor is built for that. Nothing in the Plainly or Templater descriptions we have read points at that job.
Where do these tools fit better than an After Effects based setup? Quite a few places. If your team is developers and the videos are mostly text, images and short clips composed from a layout, an API that takes JSON is a natural fit, and there is no desktop application to license or maintain. If you want to wire video into Airtable, Zapier or Make and never touch a render machine, the no-code paths exist for that. If you need to embed an editor in a product, Shotstack’s SDK is the closest match we know of in this set.
Where do they fit worse? When the look of the video depends on After Effects work you have already done, because that work has to be rebuilt in a different tool. And when the design needs the depth of effects and expressions that a motion designer builds in After Effects, you are limited to what the vendor’s editor offers. We have not tested either editor against such a design, so check it with your own template before you commit. The free trial and the free sandbox exist for exactly that test.
How to choose: start from what you already have
Forget feature checklists for a moment. Two questions settle most of this, and you probably know both answers already.
First question: do you have After Effects templates, or a motion designer who builds them?
If yes, you have two strong paths. Upload them to Plainly and let its cloud render them, or rig them with Templater and render on your own machines. Both keep the investment you already made in After Effects. Moving to Creatomate or Shotstack would mean rebuilding that work in a new editor, so do it only if you have a reason beyond curiosity.
If no, the cloud editors become far more attractive, because you are not paying to learn After Effects. Plainly and Templater both assume After Effects. If you are starting from nothing and want videos from a browser editor and an API, Creatomate or Shotstack is the shorter road. Autografs, our pre-built After Effects compositions rigged with Templater, soften the problem for Templater users without a designer, but you still need After Effects installed to run them.
Second question: do you want the rendering in someone else’s cloud, or on machines you control?
Cloud rendering means no render machines to maintain, no Adobe server license questions, and usage that grows or shrinks with your plan. Plainly, Creatomate and Shotstack all work this way. The tradeoffs are that your assets and data travel to a vendor, and that you pay in minutes or credits as you go. We cannot tell you which is cheaper for you. It depends on your volume, and each vendor’s pricing page is the place to check.
Local or self-managed rendering means your footage, your data and your finished files stay on hardware you choose. That matters for sensitive material, for large files that are slow to upload, and for teams that already own capable machines. It costs you the work of running them. Templater and Projector sit here, and QUE adds the cloud-based data and job layer on top.
Put the two questions together and you get four plain situations.
Templates in After Effects and happy to rent the rendering: Plainly fits this exactly. It is built for it and it says so. In this corner, we are not trying to talk you out of it.
Templates in After Effects and you want to own the rendering: Templater, with Projector or more Bot machines as volume grows. This is our corner, and it is the one we know best.
No After Effects templates, developers on staff, rendering in the cloud: Creatomate or Shotstack, whichever editor and API feel better when you try them. Run the same small project through both free trials and see which one you would rather work in on a Tuesday afternoon.
No After Effects templates and a need to embed an editor in your own product: look hard at Shotstack’s editor SDK first.
A worked example
Say a regional real estate team wants a short listing video for every new house on the market. Each video needs an address, a price line, five photos, an agent name and a headshot. New listings arrive every day.
If the team has no After Effects person, a Shotstack or Creatomate template is a sensible build. Shotstack even lists listing videos for real estate among its use cases. A developer connects the listing feed to the API, and each new listing triggers a render.
If the team’s brand lives in an After Effects project that a designer built last year, with a particular animation for the price line and a layout their agents recognize, rebuilding all of it in a browser editor is a real cost. Uploading that project to Plainly or rigging it with Templater preserves the design. Between those two, the deciding questions come back to rendering. If the listing photos and agent data must not leave the company’s network, Templater on its own machines, fed by a Google Sheet or QUE, is the answer. If the team has no one to maintain machines, Plainly’s cloud is the answer.
Notice that no tool won in every case. That is the correct outcome.
A few traps worth avoiding
Do not compare tools on a demo that looks nothing like your real video. Build your actual template, with your longest name, your ugliest photo and your oddest data row, and see what each tool does with it. Most disappointment in this category comes from the odd row, not the average one.
Do not forget what happens after the render. Plainly lists one-click integrations for transfer and distribution. Projector sends to Vimeo, JW Player and Frame.io and archives to AWS S3. The cloud APIs hand back a file or a URL and expect your code to take it from there. Delivery is part of the job, so ask each vendor how the finished video gets where it needs to go.
Do not skip the speed question either. We cannot give you a trustworthy number for any tool without seeing your template, and neither can anyone else. Render a sample. Our own post on speeding up After Effects exports covers the levers on the After Effects side, and our guide to batch rendering in After Effects shows how the options stack up as volume rises. If your real task is making hundreds of personalized videos from a data list, that walkthrough goes through it from the data side.
The bottom line
Plainly is a solid choice if you have After Effects templates and want someone else to render them. The alternatives matter when one of those two conditions changes. Pick Templater if you have After Effects and want the rendering on your own machines. Pick Creatomate or Shotstack if you have no After Effects templates and would rather build in a browser and call an API. The one thing to remember is that the template decides most of it. Where your template already lives is where your answer already points.
Whichever way you lean, test with your real file before you commit. Every option named here has a trial or a sandbox, and ours is the 30-day Templater trial. A free afternoon with your own worst-case data row will teach you more than any comparison article, including this one. If you want a place to start on our side, the Dataclay learning hub has the tutorials.
We covered a lot of ground up there. Here are the questions people tend to ask when they are weighing these options.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Plainly and who is it for?
Plainly is a video automation platform for After Effects. You upload After Effects templates, connect a data source such as a CSV file, its API or a native integration, and the videos render in Plainly’s cloud and can be distributed automatically. It suits teams that already have After Effects templates and want someone else to handle the rendering machines. Plans include a set number of rendering minutes, and it offers a 14-day free trial. See their pricing page for current plan details.
Do I need After Effects to use a Plainly alternative?
It depends on the alternative. Templater is an After Effects plugin, so After Effects must be installed wherever it runs. Plainly also starts from After Effects templates. Creatomate and Shotstack build templates in their own online editors, and neither homepage mentions After Effects, so you can start without it. If you already own After Effects templates, though, using Creatomate or Shotstack means rebuilding them in a new editor.
Can Templater render in the cloud like Plainly does?
Yes, with a condition. You can run Templater on Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, and Dataclay requires no special Templater license for that. After Effects must be installed and running on those machines, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not allow After Effects on a server. You need to speak with an Adobe salesperson about the right license. You also manage those machines yourself.
What data sources does Templater work with?
Templater reads Google Sheets, tab-separated files exported from Excel, Numbers or Sheets, and JSON files or feeds. It does not read an Excel file directly, so you export to a tab-delimited file first. It uses one data source at a time, and one worksheet within a Google Sheet. QUE, our JSON-based cloud data source, adds an API and a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to thousands of other apps.
Which is better for developers, Creatomate or Shotstack?
We cannot rank them, and we would not trust anyone who did without seeing your project. Creatomate offers a REST API, no-code automation, bulk generation from spreadsheets and a JavaScript Preview SDK. Shotstack offers an API with SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby, plus a white-label editor SDK you can embed. If you need an embeddable editor, look at Shotstack first. Otherwise, run the same small project through both free trials.
How can I try Templater before buying?
We offer a 30-day free trial that gives you a fully featured version of Templater Bot, which includes everything in Rig and Pro. If you buy after the trial and find it does not work for you, contact us within 30 days for a refund. One caution is that Rig and Pro will not have the Bot-only features the trial showed you. Check the edition comparison on the Templater page before you pick one.
How do I know how long a batch of videos will take to render?
Run a pre-flight. Render one video that resembles the rest of your batch on a machine like the one you will use for production, then multiply that time by the number of videos. Render time depends on video length, resolution, your hardware, how heavy the effects are and how the template is built. With Templater you can then add machines running Bot in parallel, and two machines cut the total time in half.
