It's been a while since we published a Godot vs Unity comparison, and both have had updates in the intervening period. Unity remains the most-used game engine, but Godot is becoming increasingly popular among indie developers, with Mega Crit making the transition from Unity for Slay the Spire 2.
Godot is free and open source (also see our guide to the best game development software), but could it also be the better engine for many developers? It's rare to see a direct like-for-like comparison of two both engines since that would require making the same game twice, but that's exactly what one developer started to do, beginning his game in both Unity and Godot to see how they compared. His conclusion might surprise you.
As detailed in the YouTube video above, developer Thomas Grové completed the base systems for a horror adventure game in Unity and then recreated them in Godot Engine in order to compare the process and decide which platform to settle on. He provides some side-by-side comparisons of how he found development in both engines and shares his insights on the pros and cons of each.
Although the significant differences between the two platforms led to differences in the resulting game, Thomas found both to be suitable for creating the game he was after. In both cases, he was able to achieve frame rates well above his 60fps target, and he concluded that both were also capable in performance terms.
Where things differed, however, was in the everyday practicalities and usability of each engine. Unity Hub requires 21GB of storage space and Godot Engine just 164MB. Unity, which uses C#, took 15.4 seconds to compile scripts, and Godot, which uses its own GDScript, just 0.31 seconds. Godot was also significantly faster in terms of build and startup times.
Thomas also compares the platforms' editor interfaces and the process of importing 3D models. He's ultimately decided to opt for Godot to continue the development of his game.
Such a detailed direct comparison of Godot Engine vs Unity has sparked a debate on Reddit, where other devs are contributing their own experiences. Many others also complain about the lengthy build times in Unity. Meanwhile, some solo devs say they switched to Godot after being unable to understand Unity's features or not finding enough tutorials for Unity 6, the current iteration of the engine.
“Unity has some advantages with ECS and burst. But aside from that, I don't really see it. Godot prototyping time is blistering fast and that's far more important for making and testing games,” one person writes.
“Unity's big advantage for the longest time was that you could pretty easily find jobs making Unity games, but a lot of the jobs are drying up now, so it makes me wonder what even is the point of continuing to tolerate Unity,” another dev says.
However, some have had negative experiences with performance in Godot further down the line when projects contain more objects, and some still find Godot to be incomplete for their needs.
“Right now I’m still sticking with Unity purely because the Spine support in Godot is extremely incomplete, with lots of bugs and missing features,” one person writes.
“I would choose Unity over Godot primarily because of its mature SDK integrations and services, along with its superior ecosystem maturity in the mobile segment,” someone else adds. “In my experience, I have rarely seen job positions requiring Godot expertise in mobile game studios. Once Godot achieves robust broad platform support (console / mobile), it would become a much stronger competitor”.
What's your experience? Let me know if you've been swayed to choose Godot over Unity, or vice versa, and what helped you make the decision.
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