When making particle sprites there are many image editing programs, such as gimp and krita. However for making good spritesheets I haven’t really found anything else besides Adobe After Effects. There’s also the option of just making individual frames by hand but that’s much more time consuming and really tedious and the results aren’t anywhere near as good as when made with AE.
So are there any other good programs, similar to AE, that I could use to make spritesheets for particles?