Every few months this argument restarts, and every time it is fought by people who have only ever shipped in one of them. I have billed client work in both for a year. Here is what actually happened.
The short version
After Effects wins on motion graphics. Resolve wins on everything that touches picture. That is not a compromise answer, it is just where the two tools are genuinely different.
If your work is animated UI, explainers, logo stings, kinetic type — After Effects, and it is not close. If your work is edit, grade, finish, deliver — Resolve, and it is not close either.
The interesting question is what happens in the middle, because that is where most freelance work lives.
Where After Effects still cannot be beaten
The plugin ecosystem. That is the whole answer, and people underrate how much it matters.
Twenty years of tooling means the specific weird thing you need at 1am on a deadline already exists and costs $40. Ray Dynamic Colour, Flow, Motion, Overlord, Deep Glow, Element 3D. Nothing else has this. Cavalry is a better-designed application than After Effects and it still does not have this.
Expressions are the other one. Being able to write
// A bounce that never needs a keyframe touched again
amp = .08; freq = 2.0; decay = 4.0;
n = 0;
if (numKeys > 0) { n = nearestKey(time).index; if (key(n).time > time) n--; }
if (n > 0) {
t = time - key(n).time;
v = velocityAtTime(key(n).time - .001);
value + v * amp * Math.sin(freq * t * 2 * Math.PI) / Math.exp(decay * t);
} else { value }
and have it work on any property, on any layer, forever, is a category of control Resolve's inspector does not offer.
Where Resolve quietly wins
Speed on real footage. Resolve was built around a media pool and a colour pipeline; After Effects was built around compositions and RAM previews. On anything longer than about thirty seconds of actual video, Resolve is a different class of responsive.
The grade. Obviously. But also: the fact that the grade, the edit, the sound and the delivery all live in one file with no round trips. Every round trip is a place a project goes wrong.
And Fairlight. Motion designers ignore audio and it is the single most common reason work reads as amateur. Resolve gives you a real DAW for free.
The honest workflow
I do not pick one. Almost nobody working professionally picks one.
- Design and animate graphics in After Effects.
- Export ProRes 4444 with alpha, not H.264. If you are exporting H.264 to hand off, you are throwing away the edges of everything you just animated.
- Edit, grade, sound and deliver in Resolve.
The friction in that loop is real but small, and it is much smaller than the friction of forcing either tool to do the other's job.
What about the money
After Effects is a subscription that never ends. Resolve Studio is a one-off that includes a licence dongle and free point upgrades for years.
If you are starting out with no clients, this argument is over before it starts: Resolve free is more capable than most people's first three years of need, and Blender covers the 3D. Learn on that, buy After Effects when a client is paying for it.
If you are established, £20 a month is roughly twenty minutes of billable time and this is not a real consideration.
The part nobody says
Tool arguments are mostly displacement activity. I have seen genuinely beautiful work made in software I would call bad, and I have seen dreadful work made in perfect setups. Easing, timing and taste transfer between applications. Panel layouts do not.
Learn one properly. Learn the other when a job requires it.
Working on something that needs motion? I quote per brief rather than off a price list, because a 30-second explainer and a 30-second product demo are not the same job. Tell me what you are building.
If you would rather build it yourself, my project files and presets are the actual setups from client work, not demo scenes.