Free Loading Animations for Web Apps — Lottie, GIF, and SVG Spinners (2025)

Loading states are one of the most overlooked parts of app UX. A bad spinner makes an app feel cheap. A good loading animation makes wait time feel intentional. Here's a curated list of free loading animations you can use right now, organized by format. Lottie Loading Animations (Best Quality) Lottie is the gold standard for loading animations in 2025. Files are small (5-30KB), resolution-independent, and perfectly smooth at any size. IconKing Free Lottie Loaders — 500+ free Lottie animations including dozens of loading spinners, progress indicators, and transition animations. Download as JSON, no account required. Preview any file before downloading at iconking.net/preview . Customize colors to match your brand at iconking.net/editor — swap any color in-browser. Implementation (React): import { useEffect , useRef } from ' react ' ; import lottie from ' lottie-web ' ; function Loader ({ size = 80 }) { const ref = useRef ( null ); useEffect (() => { const anim = lottie . loadAnimation ({ container : ref . current , renderer : ' svg ' , loop : true , autoplay : true , path : ' /animations/loader.json ' }); return () => anim . destroy (); }, []); return < div ref = { ref } style = { { width : size , height : size } } />; } Implementation (Vanilla JS): import lottie from ' lottie-web ' ; lottie . loadAnimation ({ container : document . getElementById ( ' loader ' ), renderer : ' svg ' , loop : true , autoplay : true , path : ' /animations/loader.json ' }); Convert Lottie Loaders to GIF Need the loading animation as a GIF for emails, Notion docs, or environments where you can't run JavaScript? Free Lottie to GIF Converter — upload your JSON, get a GIF. Browser-based, no signup. Other export formats available at iconking.net: Lottie to WebP — animated WebP, smaller than GIF Lottie to APNG — animated PNG with transparency Lottie to MP4 — for video embeds Lottie to WebM — transparent video Lottie to SVG — static frame as SVG CSS SVG Spinners (Zero Dependencies) For simple l