Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Blender
Score 9.2 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
Unity
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Unity Technologies headquartered in San Francisco offers the Unity real-time 3D and 2D development platform.
$200
per person/per month
Unreal Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Originally designed in 1998, Unreal Engine is a game engine designed to build games of all type, with sharp graphics and control, using the C++ language.N/A
Pricing
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Editions & Modules
Blender Cloud Membership
$11.50
per month
Enterprise
$200
per person/per month
Plus
$399
per person/per year
Pro
1,800
per person/per year
Personal
Free
End User License Agreement for Publishing
Free
5% of royalties after gross product revenue exceeds 1M
End User License Agreement for Creators
Free & Royalty Free
Custom Licenses
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Considered Multiple Products
Blender
Chose Blender
Blender is a more user-friendly version of these programs; not only that, but the community behind blender is great; posting everything you need on youtube or offering courses has made it so much easier to learn new ways to make renders or assets, also there are plenty of free …
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 …
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 …
Unity
Chose Unity
We love utilizing unreal engines but we seem to have a better use case for the architectural visualization side of things. This has given us the ability to find better more photo-realistic assets from not only the marketplace but 3rd party sites that have a unity bases file to …
Chose Unity
I think Unreal is for those who want to develop very high-quality videogames (For consoles) Especially when attention to detail is important. However, Unity has a lot of features for those who want to develop a variety of apps for different technologies. The clear purpose and …
Chose Unity
Unity offer more variety and more library assets in comparison with any other game development platform out there. The price and support is what actually separate unity from others as you wouldn't get any quality with such cheap prices in any other platform. The unity platform …
Unreal Engine

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Small Businesses
Onshape
Onshape
Score 7.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Onshape
Onshape
Score 7.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Navisworks
Navisworks
Score 9.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(25 ratings)
9.4
(10 ratings)
9.2
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BlenderUnityUnreal Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Unity Technologies
Unity is excellent for 2D and 3D games and educational experiences. It is well-suited for VR and AR development. It is also a great platform for mobile games. It is less-suited for non-game purposes (although it can certainly be used for those as well), or educational experiences. It is also less-suited for AR experiences that are highly complex, where you will probably want to write the native code in Android Studio or Xcode, as the case may be. It is theoretically less-suited for cases where performance is a huge concern as well, although, in my experience, performance has never been a problem.
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Epic Games
It's really well suited for experiential uses. Sure, games are made with it, but I'm guessing that more non-gaming assets are being made with it than anyone realizes. It's a fantastic post-production for 3d modeling tasks. It's fantastic for fast nearly photo real rendering. It's almost as good at rendering truly photo real assets now that Path Tracing is becoming mature. It's fantastic for creating background and matte plates for video and film production. There are few things that do that as well as it can. It's not well suited to modeling the initial 3d object so you really need to have something to build the 3d assets in. Hard asset modeling and creating is the one area that it's lacking. But, even if it never rises to the level to compete with 3ds Max or Maya, etc., that's ok, because it's just another tool and it does what it does so well, that modeling deficiencies can be overlooked
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Pros
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.
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Unity Technologies
  • Unity is a multiplatform game engine. It has more than 20 options for exporting your game, ranging from desktop, mobile, console, web and, lately, VR and AR. Unity was one of the first game engines able to export games playable on internet browsers and it helped to cement the World Wide Web as a place fit for gaming.
  • Unity has a very smooth learning curve for beginners. It is easy to start and soon you are seeing some tangible results of your efforts. The game engine has all sorts of helpers and shortcuts to facilitate some frequent tasks in game development.
  • Another of Unity's advantage is the access to Assets Store from within the game engine, allowing the user to import instantly objects, scripts and textures from the store into their projects. Such easy access to these elements from inside a project greatly enhances speed production and is particularly helpful to beginners.
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Epic Games
  • Achieving proper depth effect of the background layer
  • Walkthrough videos of any given layout can be easily prepared and made more immersive
  • Creating the most detailed 3D models
  • Takes very little time to produce the required renders depending on the complexity of the input
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Cons
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.
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Unity Technologies
  • To create an app, you'll need to integrate a variety of technology.
  • Compatibility Issues arises sometimes after update
  • Continue to develop ML learning models for AI.
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Epic Games
  • The modeling tools are getting better but have a good way to go to really be intuitive
  • They are trying to bridge the gap between coders and artists and have done well but more needs to continue to happen to enable users who have little experience writing code to be able to use it effectively. It's not that this is a "room for improvement" thing per se, it's just that more of it needs to be done and I think they know that and are on it.
  • It's so powerful, it's difficult to find anything else that needs improvement. It's kind of mindblowing what it's capable of.
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Usability
Open Source
Because while it's a pretty good piece of software, the default built-in commands, the interface layout, and certain functions aren't as logical in their way of being arranged and executed. This, of course, doesn't diminish its use or effectiveness in your field of work, but it is quite awkward at first. A big advantage is that Blender lets you customize the interface however you want as well as keyboard shortcuts and several general program parameters.
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Unity Technologies
It's actually incredibly easy to use given the complex tasks you have. Once you learn the various windows it becomes second nature. Compared to something like Blender (which I would probably rate as a 2 on usability), the learning curve of Unity is a breeze! The only improvements I can think of would be to streamline some common workflows so you don't have to dig through menus to find them.
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Epic Games
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Unity Technologies
I have not had to use Unity's support extensively. This is likely because there is so much documentation and so many classes available for free online. Due to this, there is little need for support. They were very responsive when I requested educational licensing. Setting it up and providing it all quickly.
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Epic Games
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
Unity Technologies
We love utilizing unreal engines but we seem to have a better use case for the architectural visualization side of things. This has given us the ability to find better more photo-realistic assets from not only the marketplace but 3rd party sites that have a unity bases file to work off of.
Read full review
Epic Games
Despite the fact that the Unreal Engine user interface took some getting used to, it was rather simple to navigate once we got the hang of it. Furthermore, Unreal Engine offers unrivalled flexibility and fine-tuning tools. Twinmotion has a slightly complicated UI as well, but the number of options for personalization and fine adjustment is limited
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Return on Investment
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.
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Unity Technologies
  • Unity has a positive impact because, as of now, we don't have to pay for our license because we do not go beyond the revenue roof.
  • We cannot say more than that because the games that we are producing in Unity are not yet launched.
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Epic Games
  • It's helped a tiny studio like mine to compete with larger and more financially sound studios.
  • It gives me another product from which I can derive a revenue stream.
  • Unless you are publishing a game for sale or a packaged product, UE is free to use and tinker with. You can use it to build something amazing to use in your portfolio which in turn can help you sell your skills.
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