Best FiveM Emote Menu Script in 2026

What a FiveM emote menu actually has to cover

An emote menu is the most used script on a roleplay server and the one nobody budgets for. Underneath, every option in this guide is the same data model: a name mapped to an animation dictionary and a clip, with flags for looping, upper body only and whether the player can move. What separates them is everything wrapped around that. Can a player find an emote by typing three letters, or do they scroll a list of six hundred. Do props attach to the right bone at the right offset, or does the cigarette come out of the jaw. When two players want the same animation, does the second one get asked first. And when the player gets rammed by a car mid emote, does the clip stop and the prop get deleted, or does the server accumulate floating beer bottles until the next restart.

Notice what is not on that list. Nobody has ever left a server because it had eleven hundred animations instead of eighteen hundred. Library size is the number every store page leads with and the least useful one on it, because a player uses about fifteen emotes and binds four.

The free options, counted rather than described

Store pages quote animation counts, repositories can be counted. So both were, in September 2026, by reading the data files.

rpemotes-reborn ships 658 emotes, 603 prop emotes, 136 dances, 139 walk styles, 118 animal emotes, 93 shared emotes, 38 facial expressions and 18 exit animations in its AnimationList.lua, which is 1,803 entries. It is GPL-3.0, it sat at version 2.1.4 with its last push on 13 August 2026, and it ships 29 locale files. Its config gates individual emotes behind ACE permissions, disables the animations that can be abused in combat by default, runs group emotes on a ten second countdown inside a configurable radius, and carries a UseNUIMenu switch that replaces the old scaleform list with an NUI one. The README is blunt about the commercial side: the project is free, and will always be free, which is aimed squarely at the people reselling it.

scully_emotemenu is a rewrite rather than a fork, and it is bigger: 1,642 dances, 501 general emotes, 374 prop emotes, 88 animal emotes, 84 consumable emotes and 60 synchronized emotes, plus 134 walk styles, 60 expressions and 48 scenarios. That is 2,749 emotes, the largest library in this comparison by a distance. It is GPL-3.0 at version 2.1.0, last pushed 10 June 2026, it requires ox_lib, and it is configured entirely through convars in its own cfg file rather than a Lua config, which is either a relief or an irritation depending on your habits. Whole categories ship disabled, so a fresh install is quieter than the numbers suggest. Custom emotes go in through addEmoteToMenu and addEmotesToMenu exports, and there is a conversion site for bringing emotes over from dpemotes and its forks.

dpemotes is where all of this came from, and the andristum repository has not been pushed since 22 May 2024. It still works. It is also the reason the ecosystem exists, since almost every custom emote pack on the forum is written in its format. Install it in 2026 only if you have a specific reason.

There is one more free entry worth knowing about, because it changes the calculation for the whole category. MBT Emote Menu is listed at 0.00 EUR and is not a menu at all, it is a replacement interface that requires rpemotes-reborn 2.1.2 or newer and adds search, favourites, an eight slot wheel, quick binds, playlists, a photo mode and a scene editor on top of the free data. The catch is the licence, PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, which is not a normal open source licence and restricts commercial use. If your server sells anything, read it before you install it.

Props, shared emotes and who asked whom

Two things separate a menu that survives a busy nightclub from one that does not. The first is prop handling. Between a third and half of the entries in every library here carry an object attached to a bone, and the quality difference is entirely in the offsets: the same smoking animation is either a cigarette held between two fingers or a cigarette buried in the wrist. Newer scripts spawn those props client side and track them with state bags instead of networking an object per player, which is the single biggest reason a modern menu behaves better with thirty people in one room. rpemotes-reborn keeps the old networked path as a fallback switch for servers where the new one misbehaves.

The second is consent, and the free options are better here than their price suggests. In rpemotes-reborn a shared emote is a request: you aim at a player, press K, and the server verifies the two peds are within 3 metres and re-checks the ACE permission before it forwards anything to the target. Group emotes gather several players and start on a countdown inside a radius you set. scully_emotemenu has synchronized emotes and synchronized particle effects, both shipped off by default. A paid menu that lets one player drag another into an animation with no prompt and no server side distance check is worse than the free one, and it is the specific thing to test on a dev server before you buy.

Stream weight, resmon and the preview problem

Emote menus are cheap at idle and expensive on disk. rpemotes-reborn is 79 MB extracted, 75 MB of which is the stream folder holding custom animations and props. scully_emotemenu is 24 MB with 22 MB of stream. That is not server CPU, it is the download every player pulls the first time they connect, and on a server already streaming a car pack it is worth knowing which one you are adding.

The runtime cost that does show up in resmon is the preview ped, and the rpemotes-reborn config says so in a comment next to the setting: resmon increases while emotes are being previewed. That is honest and it is also unavoidable, since previewing means playing the animation on a second ped. Menus that preview with recorded video clips instead move the cost from the frame to the download, which is what the Onex release thread argues about at length, with the seller explaining that previews are pulled incrementally as players browse rather than all at once. Either approach is defensible. What matters is knowing which one you bought.

The FiveM emote menu market in September 2026

Every price below was read from the vendor page or the repository in September 2026. Library counts marked as counted were taken by reading the data files, not from a store page. Two prices are promotional at the time of reading and both are shown with their undiscounted figure in the paragraph after the table.

Three things fall out of that table. The paid band is unusually cheap, roughly a third of what a clothing shop or a banking script costs, which tells you vendors know what they are competing against. The escrow to source gap is the widest on this site: the same ATY script costs 4.5 times more if you want to read it, which is the whole argument of the escrow versus open source guide in one product. And the studios that sell 60 EUR clothing and appearance suites did not turn up anywhere in this search, which is what you would expect underneath a free script that ships eighteen hundred animations in twenty nine languages.

What paying actually buys

It is a short list, and it is not the library. It is the shape of the interaction. An eight slot wheel and numpad bindings, so the four emotes a player uses constantly never require opening a menu. Playlists, so a dancer can queue a routine instead of clicking every eight seconds. A history tab, because the emote nobody can find again is the one they used yesterday. A photo or screenshot mode with the HUD hidden and a free camera, which is the feature that quietly produces your server marketing. And a front end that looks like it was designed after 2019, which sounds like vanity until you watch a new player fail to find the search box.

The uncomfortable part is that MBT Emote Menu bolts most of that list onto rpemotes-reborn for nothing, provided the noncommercial licence fits your server. So the honest case for buying is narrower than it was a year ago: you are paying for one resource that ships all of it together, supported, without a licence question, and without a hard dependency on a second project staying compatible.

Where Var-Emote fits, honestly

Var-Emote runs on ESX, QBCore and standalone, and ships 381 emotes, 222 dances, 273 prop emotes, 114 walk styles, 51 animal emotes and 28 facial expressions. The menu is React, opens with M, and is backed by an eight slot quick access wheel and numpad keybind slots for the emotes a player uses without thinking. Playlists hold up to ten lists of twenty emotes each, and a history tab keeps the last thirty. Shared emotes number 42, with a distance check, accept and decline prompts, a request timeout and server side rate limiting, which is the consent behaviour described earlier and the part worth checking on any paid menu. A 3D placement mode drops an emote at a chosen world position with a live preview gizmo, and the bundled utility modules cover crouch and crawl, pointing, ragdoll, hands up, walk styles, selfie and screenshot capture, plus binoculars with normal, night and thermal vision.

Now the part that matters if you are comparing it against the free field. Its library is 1,111 animations, which is smaller than rpemotes-reborn at 1,803 and considerably smaller than scully_emotemenu at 2,749, so if you are buying on count alone you should not buy at all. The feature list does not claim per emote ACE permission gating, which rpemotes-reborn does have, and it does not publish a locale count against the 29 files rpemotes ships. And placement mode, binoculars, crouch, crawl, pointing and ragdoll all exist in the free menu too, so those are not reasons to pay. The wheel, the numpad slots, the playlists, the history and the screenshot mode in one supported resource are the reasons, and they are the only ones being claimed here. It sells in the three tiers every Var script uses, escrowed at 17.99 EUR, partially open at 27.59 EUR and full source at 57.59 EUR, so the licence question is a purchase decision rather than a support ticket.

Whichever way you go, the thing to do before it reaches your live server is the same. Put it on a dev box with two clients connected, run a shared emote and confirm the second player is asked rather than told. Play a prop emote, get hit by a car mid animation, and look at the floor. Then open the menu, watch resmon while the preview ped is running, and check the download size you are about to add to first connect. If you want the emote names themselves rather than the menu around them, they are listed in the FiveM emote list, and the raw dictionaries behind them are in the FiveM animation list.

Related: FiveM emote list · FiveM animation list