Autodesk Maya vs. Blender

Blender

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Autodesk Maya	Score 7.9 out of 10	N/A	Autodesk offers Maya, a 3D animation, modeling, simulation and rendering tool available to artists, animators, and educators, used to create realistic characters, models, and scenes, as well as effects such as explosions, cloth movement, etc.	$234 per month
Blender	Score 9.1 out of 10	N/A	Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite available in under the GNU General Public License. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Blender Cloud is a related service accessible via subscription, and is a training and content platform providing access to expertise from the Blender Institute for advancing one's use of Blender.	$11.50 per month

Pricing

Autodesk Maya

Blender

Editions & Modules

Monthly: $235
per month per user
Yearly: $1875
per year per user
3-Year: $5625
3 years per user

Blender Cloud Membership: $11.50
per month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Autodesk Maya	Blender
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

Maya is also available through Autodesk's Flex plan and pricing. Tokens expire 1 year from date of purchase. Not all products and features are available with Flex. Students and teachers at qualified academic institutions worldwide are eligible for free access to Autodesk software for one-year through the Autodesk Education Community.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Autodesk Maya	Blender
Considered Both Products	Autodesk Maya Salomi Rai Junior Animator Chose Autodesk Maya Animating in Autodesk Maya is much more convenient and easier in comparison to Blender. It's easier to use features like constrains, motion trails, and attribute editors in Autodesk Maya. Most of the time I use Blender for modeling and Autodesk Maya for animation. Either way, I … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose Autodesk Maya Autodesk Maya is better than these other softwares because Autodesk Maya is a software that does not have updates every time, and this means that you do not have to waste time seeing what has been updated and what has not. Incentivized Helpful?	Blender Yaco Lioi Cofundador Chose Blender We selected Blender for most of use cases because it's availability and ease of use. Having no commitment in terms of plans or pricing also gives us more freedom to try it out, and we ended up staying with Blender. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Director Chose Blender Well, in fact, I haven't used any of that software, but there is one thing I know: Blender is free. That's huge for small business owners like me; it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. I have heard other people saying that the Autodesk offerings have … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose Blender Again, Blender wins over its competition in the number of users and its large community because it is free software. Whether you like it or not, that's a kickstart that makes a noticeable difference. But, indeed, its competition is usually much more powerful and professional, … Incentivized Helpful? Jitendra Choubisa AR VR Content Developer Chose Blender Blender is first of all free and open source software. It has very easy to use tools which can help one in navigating and modifying easily and efficiently. It is also very less in size, on my system it is of 355 MB. The rendering engine Cycle works simultaneously in the … Incentivized Helpful? DV Dominique Vilbrun Lead Designer Chose Blender The biggest advantage of Blender over these alternatives was how easy it was to learn, even for team members with no previous experience in 3D modeling, design, or any artistic field. The fact that it allows you to import or export files in most of the existing 3D model … Incentivized Helpful? Aniket Kumar Chaudhary Content Writer & Video Editor Chose Blender To date, Maya has been and is the undisputed leader in the sector. Despite being at such a high price, there is really no substitute for Maya's quality. Therefore, the use of Incentivized Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Easy to build Pro Easy to collaborate Pro Useful as well	Pro 3d modeling Pro Free and open Pro Open source
Top Cons	Minus Better design Minus Better price Minus Developer tools	Minus New users Minus Lot of features Minus Working with large

Best Alternatives
	Autodesk Maya	Blender
Small Businesses	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Rhino Score 8.8 out of 10	Rhino Score 8.8 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Autodesk Maya	Blender
Likelihood to Recommend	7.5 (7 ratings)	9.6 (23 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Autodesk Maya	Blender
Likelihood to Recommend	Autodesk We have the design team using that to create videos for our concepts in the Cyber security - Products, services and solutions as well as in AI/ML, basically everything that needs to be communicated in the best way we use Autodesk Maya for the videos thus making it more fun and easy to understand the concepts to get going. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source Blender is an excellent tool for everything from simple to complex 3D animations, the creation of 3D images, etc. It performs excellently in all of these areas. In the realm of 3D modelling, animation and rendering, there is very little that Blender is not suited for. Incentivized Kèlene Poyurs Co-Founder Read full review
Pros	Autodesk Easy to build workflow due to strong customizability. Industry share. Easy to collaborate with other companies. Strong cooperation with other software. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender. Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc. Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in. Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections. The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software. The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender. Incentivized Jitendra Choubisa AR VR Content Developer Read full review
Cons	Autodesk Right now Maya has no good viewport like Blender 2.8 has. It is good that Maya 2019 devs focused on performance and stability but it's strange to see that mainstream soft aren't on trend in developing really cool and helpful tools. Maya LT is very good for artist who don't need complex FX tools. So the devs must add python API to Maya LT. Add more helpful tools to modeling section especially for retopology. Incentivized Miroslav Bobryshev 3D Asset Artist / 3D Generalist Read full review	Open Source It's really a hard question, but it could be: a game engine. Older versions used to have it; I would use it to simulate machines game-like. I'm struggling to find another one; maybe the fact that it is so powerful and has so many features that learning it can be daunting; better documentation WITH examples and/or a map of Blender capabilities would help to know where you are in terms of knowledge and the planning the roadmap to where you want to go. Precision modeling. Coming from CAD and using Blender as part of my design workflow, I'd love to be able to model inside Blender as I model with CAD tools. At this moment, it's simply impossible. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Autodesk Animating in Autodesk Maya is much more convenient and easier in comparison to Blender. It's easier to use features like constrains, motion trails, and attribute editors in Autodesk Maya. Most of the time I use Blender for modeling and Autodesk Maya for animation. Either way, I like to use both software according to my needs. Incentivized Salomi Rai Junior Animator Read full review	Open Source We've only used the consumer (non-pro) version of SketchUp, which we love, but is very limited in features and output capabilities compared to Blender. While Blender's learning curve is MUCH steeper than SketchUp, it feels like truly complete, professional design software. Incentivized ME Matt Eddy Creative Director Read full review
Return on Investment	Autodesk Effectively able to get the designs created and visualised Video creation for concepts has become easy ROI has been good, but if the costing is brought down then its even more amazing Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source As it is a beginner-friendly software with increasing demand in the animation sector again, it positively impacts the business. Except in some specific cases, no one will use Blender on their own at a professional level. When I was a beginner, it took me a lot of time to learn, consequently designing the creation. But if we want to learn to master Blender, we can do it. As long as we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities. Incentivized Aniket Kumar Chaudhary Content Writer & Video Editor Read full review
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