KBar alternative: mouzeclick vs KBar, a toolbar or a wheel on your mouse

What is KBar, and why look for a KBar alternative?

KBar is KraftyFX's toolbar builder for After Effects, sold on aescripts. The current version is KBar3, 3.1.5 from 19 January 2026. You make up to four toolbars, switched with keyboard modifiers, and fill them with buttons that run:

• effects and presets;
• menu commands;
• extensions;
• expressions, scripts and scriptlets;
• shell commands.

You pick icons from a set of 600+, export and import toolbars to share them, and other script authors plug into it: Flow, the easing editor, can export its whole curve library to KBar (the After Effects easing presets guide compares Flow with mouzeclick's Easing lab). It costs $39.99 once.

People who search for a KBar alternative usually want something it doesn't do:

• Buttons on the mouse rather than on screen.
• The same setup in Premiere Pro. KBar is After Effects only.
• A menu at the pointer, radial rather than docked.
• Something free. FX Console from Video Copilot is free, but it does effect search and snapshots, not custom buttons.

How do KBar and mouzeclick compare?

KBar is a one-time script for toolbars inside After Effects; mouzeclick is a plan that puts tools on your mouse in After Effects, Premiere Pro and every other app. As each maker's page showed it on 31 October 2026:

Is a toolbar or a mouse wheel better for After Effects?

Neither wins at everything. A toolbar is better for things you need to see; a wheel is better for things you do without looking.

• A docked toolbar is always on screen. That suits 40 scripts you use once a week and would forget the names of. It costs panel space, and every press is a trip across the screen with the pointer and back.
• A wheel opens where the pointer already is. Hold F10, or hold the right mouse button (the delay is yours, 80 to 600 ms, and a quick right-click still opens After Effects' own menu), flick toward a segment and let go. Nothing is docked, and after a few days your hand knows the directions without reading labels.
• Keyboard shortcuts beat both for the handful of commands you use every minute, and they're free in After Effects.

Our rule of thumb: shortcuts for your top ten, a wheel for the next fifty, and a toolbar or a search box for the long tail. KBar covers the third part well. mouzeclick covers the second, and the first through mouse buttons.

What is the closest thing to KBar in mouzeclick?

mouzerun: an After Effects extension, on Windows and Mac, for building your own panel of one-click buttons. It's the part of mouzeclick that does KBar's job most directly.

• Five kinds of button: Script (code or a .jsx file), Expression, Preset, Menu command and Ease.
• One undo step each. Menu commands keep After Effects' own undo, and a script can opt out.
• Alt-click runs a second action. Loop's is Ping-pong; yours can run another button, or the same script with mouzerun.alt set.
• Presets can make their own layer: with nothing selected, you choose a solid, a shape layer or a text layer.
• Six starters, Wiggle, Loop, Smooth 60, Pre-compose, Centre layers and Nudge, then your own, in groups with 9 colours, 24 icons, search, and Export and Import.
• Right-click a button to change, duplicate, move or delete it.

Where KBar goes further: 600+ icons against 24, shell commands, extension buttons, four modifier-switched toolbars, and other scripts that export straight to it. mouzerun's case is simpler: it comes with the Tool wheel and the rest of mouzeclick, so you don't buy a toolbar on top. Open it from Window › Extensions › mouzerun after mouzeclick installs its After Effects bridge; every card is on the extensions page.

How does the Tool wheel work as a KBar alternative?

The Tool wheel is the part KBar's page has nothing like. Hold F10 over a comp, or hold the right mouse button, and 114 tools in 13 groups fan out under the pointer; flick to one and let go. Each tool confirms what it did with a short note by the pointer.

• Four layouts to start from: Default, Motion Design, Animate and Finishing.
• Groups you'll recognise: pre-comp, split and render; centre, fit and fill; new layers above your selection; blurs, effects and colour; an anchor grid. Ctrl+Z takes back a Null + Parent in one step.
• Make it yours: drag tools onto segments, rename them, give them icons and colours, and lock what's finished.
• Your installed effects: Search effects finds any installed effect by typing, with your 12 most recent picks first. Enter applies it; Shift+Enter applies it and pins it to the wheel.
• Premiere Pro too: the same wheel holds 112 Premiere Pro tools in 12 segments, so one habit covers both apps.
• Any mouse: wired, wireless or Bluetooth, no driver, on Windows and Mac.

The After Effects radial menu guide walks through the wheel group by group.

How do you move a KBar setup to mouzeclick?

By hand, button by button: mouzeclick doesn't import KBar toolbars. Treat it as a chance to drop the buttons you never press.

1. Export your KBar toolbars first, so you have a backup.
2. List your buttons by type and mark the ones you actually used last month.
3. Scripts become mouzerun Script buttons, pointing at the same .jsx file or holding the code.
4. Expressions and presets become mouzerun Expression and Preset buttons.
5. Menu commands become mouzerun Menu command buttons, unless the Tool wheel already has that tool.
6. Effects go on the wheel: open Search effects, type the name and press Shift+Enter.
7. Commands you run from a keyboard shortcut can move to a mouse button or a chord in the mouzeclick app, set for After Effects only.
8. Shell commands and extension buttons have no mouzerun equivalent listed. Keep KBar for those.

You can run both while you switch, and keep KBar for the long tail afterwards.

How do you get one-click commands in After Effects without a plugin?

After Effects doesn't ship a toolbar you can fill with your own buttons, but its own features get you part of the way.

• Keyboard shortcuts: the Keyboard Shortcuts editor (Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts on Windows) opens a visual keyboard where you assign keys to most menu commands.
• Scripts: File › Scripts › Run Script File runs any .jsx. A script saved in After Effects' Scripts folder appears in the File › Scripts menu, and a ScriptUI panel saved in the ScriptUI Panels folder appears at the bottom of the Window menu, ready to dock.
• Presets: save your own with Animation › Save Animation Preset, then apply it by typing its name in the Effects & Presets panel.
• Expressions: Alt-click (Option-click on Mac) a stopwatch and type the expression.

Disciplined editors get a long way with that. What it lacks is buttons, a wheel and anything that changes per app. For how KBar, mouzerun and ScriptUI panels differ under the hood, see After Effects plugins vs scripts vs extensions; for ready-made code, the After Effects expressions library.

Where is KBar the better pick?

KBar is the better pick if you want docked buttons in After Effects and nothing else, paid for once.

• Price. $39.99 once, with cheap upgrades for KBar1 and KBar2 owners. mouzeclick's yearly price is $249.
• Studios. A Floating Server licence is on offer.
• The long tail. Four always-visible toolbars and 600+ icons suit a big collection of rarely used scripts.
• Shell commands and extension buttons, which mouzerun doesn't list.
• An ecosystem. Other scripts export to KBar; Flow's curve library is one example.
• A free trial before you pay, as with mouzeclick.
• No mouse remapping. If you don't want your mouse buttons touched and never open Premiere Pro, most of what mouzeclick adds is wasted on you.

When is mouzeclick the better KBar alternative?

When you want your commands under your hand rather than on a bar, in more than one app.

• Premiere Pro as well. The 112-tool wheel, mouzeclick Studio and the Toolbar's 14 quick jobs (keys 1 to 9 run pinned tools). See the Premiere Pro tools page.
• Every other app. Per-app buttons, chords and gestures: hold one button and press another, move up, down, left or right, or scroll, with eleven slots per button. Keyboard hotkeys and macros with a recorder for keys, clicks, waits and text. The Premiere Pro mouse shortcuts guide shows a full setup.
• Favourites on F8. The Options wheel holds 48 favourites per app on three rings.
• Tools, not just buttons. The plan includes 15 After Effects extensions, such as mouzekit's 28 tools and mousecut's editing timeline, and on Windows the After Effects workspace.

If you'd rather compare against a full toolkit than a button bar, read the Motion Studio comparison. Prices for every plan are in the pricing section.

Questions people ask

Sources

Checked on 2026-10-31. Prices and features change: each link goes to the maker's own page.

1. aescripts: KBar3 (price, licences, toolbars, button types, versions, trial)
2. aescripts: Flow (exports its curve library to KBar)
3. Video Copilot: FX Console (free, effect search and snapshots)

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