MotionSites vs Thanor: what each prompt contains

A MotionSites prompt runs 2,000 to 4,000 words. A Thanor prompt runs 9,700 to 16,900, and the longest is 97,441 characters. Those are lengths, not verdicts. A word count measures length and nothing else.

What it does tell you is how much room there is for decisions, and the decisions are the thing you are buying when you buy text. So here is what is actually inside the two files, block by block, which is a comparison nobody among the eleven libraries selling these publishes about themselves.

What is in a MotionSites prompt#

A long written build spec, and a real one. Named colour values, exact class strings and specific animation timings rather than adjectives, which is more than most of this category writes down.

The catalogue runs to 153 items. Prompt packs start at $49, a year is $279 and lifetime is $399. Each item carries a looping video of the result, and the prompt references that video, which is why what comes out tends to resemble the preview you clicked on. Their published lessons are build-alongs and they are good at that format.

Three things follow from pairing every prompt with a video, and all three matter before you spend anything:

• You buy against evidence. You watch the result, then buy the text that produced something close to it, which removes the largest unknown in this category. Most sellers of written artefacts ask you to trust a description.
• The preview is a direction, not a deliverable. A video shows one run of one prompt in one tool, and changing the tool, the model version or the copy you feed it moves the output.
• The video URL is hard coded inside the prompt, so a site built straight from it serves that file from somebody else's storage. Swap it for your own asset before anything goes live.

The nine blocks#

A Thanor prompt has a fixed shape. Every block is there because a design fails a particular way without it.

1. Concept, one line, in a sentence a person would say out loud. Everything after it is constrained by it.
2. Art direction. Four to six hex values with a named role each, and the neutral's hue bias stated explicitly.
3. Typography. Two faces with the fallback stack written out, a scale of four or five sizes in px, the weight at each, line heights, letter-spacing.
4. Layout and rhythm. The grid, the gutter, the page margins, and the vertical rhythm as a sequence of real numbers in the shape of 160 / 96 / 48.
5. Motion. Named curves with real values, durations in ms, what is driven continuously by scroll progress against what fires once, the entrance order with its delays, and what survives prefers-reduced-motion.
6. Sections, numbered, each written so that section 4 can be built without having read section 3.
7. Assets, as absolute URLs, with the instruction to use those exact URLs.
8. The never list, specific to this design rather than generic taste advice.
9. Acceptance, five or six checks a person can run by eye.
10. Self-check, instructing the model to declare at the end anything it could not do and anywhere it deviated.

Two house rules carry most of the weight, and they are written into the format itself:

Exact values, never adjectives. #0F1317 not "deep charcoal".

A pure mid-grey is the single clearest tell of a generated design.

The never list is the block people underestimate. It bans, by name, the current cluster of generated-design defaults: purple-to-blue gradient heroes, near-black with one acid-green accent, emoji section markers, rounded cards with an accent rail, everything centred. Inter and Space Grotesk are forbidden as display faces, not because they are bad faces but because they are the default reach of every generated design of this period. The permitted display list is named in full: Archivo, Bricolage Grotesque, Instrument Sans, Familjen Grotesk, Schibsted Grotesk, Onest, Outfit, Figtree, Sora, Manrope, Be Vietnam Pro.

Every file passes an automatic gate before it enters the library. The gate fails a prompt for a copied class name, a BEM or id selector, a carried comment, a copied SVG path, a missing block, fewer than four colours, under 1,200 words, or motion described with no curve and no duration.

The number nobody agrees on#

Motion is where this gets interesting, because the published positions do not line up and most prompts avoid the problem by naming no number at all.

Thanor sits at the slow end on structural moves, on the argument that a 1100ms reveal reads as expensive and a 300ms one reads as cheap. Webflow's free guide argues for speed and closes with when in doubt, speed it up. Both positions are defensible and they are optimising for different things: one for perceived responsiveness, one for perceived value.

Here is the part that matters to you either way. The failure mode is not picking the wrong duration. It is a prompt that names no duration at all, which leaves the model to pick, and the model picks the same 300ms fade and slide for everybody. You can disagree with a number. You cannot disagree with a blank.

The rule that survives either position: pick one duration per class of move, write it into the file beside its curve, and hold it across the whole page. Consistency reads as intent at any speed.

Who each one is for#

MotionSites is for somebody who wants a specific animated effect, today, from a catalogue of 153, having watched it run before paying. That is a real want and a catalogue is the right shape for it, and most of the free alternatives people reach for instead answer a different question.

Thanor is for somebody with a page that does not exist yet and no settled idea what it should look like. A gallery cannot answer that, because a gallery answers which of these and the question is what should this be.

There is one risk both formats share and it is worth naming: a prompt a thousand people buy produces a thousand sites that rhyme. It is the same convergence that makes generated pages look alike. The defence is the part of the file written against that specific design, the palette with its stated hue bias and the never list that rules out this season's defaults, which is exactly the part a short brief has no room for.

Go and look at a Thanor specification, all nine blocks of one, and judge the format the way this page has judged everything else: by the number of decisions already made before you paste it.