I use a few programs for my own animated gifs!
You might want to look into firealpaca which is a good art program to use for making art of all sizes- i use it for my pixel art and simple small animations! You might have to look up some tutorials on how to use it in this way but it's pretty easygoing once you get the hang of it! The thing is you can only make frames and export them separately, you can't make a gif in firealpaca directly. Still it's relatively easy to draw and edit in firealpaca.

You can also have numerous pieces of art open at once which can help a lot.
I would take my frames to ezgif (this is an in-browser gif maker!) to animate my exported frames into animations. it gets the job done and it's pretty intuitive to use, too!
I hope once you make your animations that you share them here! Your art is so cool!!