MotionSites vs Thanor: what each prompt contains

The two prompts MotionSites publishes openly, each a navbar and a hero, run about 650 words. A Thanor prompt runs from about 2,600 words for a single section to past 16,000 for a full page, and the longest come close to 100,000 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 none of the eleven prompt libraries we measured publishes about itself.

Every Thanor design runs as a live preview of what its prompt builds. Three of them, each with its values written down to the hex:

What is in a MotionSites prompt#

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

The catalog runs past 500 prompts by its own count. At the time of writing, prompt packs start at $49 for two prompts, three months cost $129, 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 artifacts 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: a one-line concept, then nine numbered blocks. 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-gray 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 centered. 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 colors, 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, under a rule headed when in doubt, speed it up. Both positions are defensible and they are optimizing 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. Website animation effects lists a duration and a curve for each common move, if you want a starting set.

Who each one is for#

MotionSites is for somebody who wants a specific animated effect, today, from a catalog of more than 500, having watched it run before paying. That is a real want and a catalog 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 defense 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.

Open Vesperion and copy its prompt; it is free with an account, all nine blocks of it. Judge the format the way this page has judged everything else: by the number of decisions already made before you paste it. The rest of the library comes with a paid plan, listed on the pricing page.