Software has changed a lot since I started graphic design and it's been quite a few years since I tried animating characters. I wanted to start off simple by just having a character wave using only free software.

For this experiment I designed my character above using Gravit Designer.

I knew for a fact I did not want to do frame by frame animation (Which leaves apps like GIMP out of the question). But Instead use keyframe based animation.
I first tried Google Web Designer then Edge Animate 1.5 which are not really designed for this kind of animation, they're more prone for animated web based advertisements that do not loop. Edge Animate however is great for making games and apps but is not designed for specific character animations more or less interactions with DOM (Document Object Model) elements. Not to mention I cannot interact with paths of my svg with these applications. You have to save each part of the character as a separate image in order to animate it using these applications which I did not want to do. (They're great apps btw and I do recommend them as a good animation tool but like I said it did not suite well with I how I wanted to animate)

However there is Adobe Animate which used to be called Flash and well I guess the name speaks for itself. I would've gone this route but I don't want to pay the $20 a month adobe subscription which is why I stopped using adobe products and also doesn't work well with my goal of using only free software.

So long story short I ended up using Synfig Studio for this animation. You can import a character you designed in a Vector editor like Gravit Designer or Inkscape and you can interact with the paths of the SVG you imported which is exactly how I wanted to animate. 

I noticed right away the software had changed a lot over the years and I wouldn't recommend using it for drawing SVG's itself as apps like Gravit Designer and Inkscape do a very good job at it but Synfig is definitely a great application to create character animations. It's not as user friendly as other applications of it's nature and takes quite sometime to learn. However the Synfig team created a training course that I highly recommend for you to checkout if you're serious on learning how to animate with it. BTW: The course only costs $1 which greatly helps the team continue to develop the application.

I recreated the same animation using Blender which extracted the frames as images and I imported the images into GIMP to create the GIF animation.