Google ARCore vs. Unity

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
ARCore
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Google's ARCore is an augmented reality development SDK.N/A
Unity
Score 9.0 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
Pricing
Google ARCoreUnity
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Enterprise
$200
per person/per month
Plus
$399
per person/per year
Pro
1,800
per person/per year
Personal
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ARCoreUnity
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google ARCoreUnity
Top Pros
Top Cons
User Ratings
Google ARCoreUnity
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(3 ratings)
9.4
(10 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google ARCoreUnity
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
ARCore is well suited for demonstrating 3D objects on surfaces that could be used mostly in product sales, real estate. It can be used to measure objects or a room to make a 3D architectural model out of it, although it's not 100% accurate it can give a pretty good idea. It can be used for games and marketing reasons ARCore is less appropriate for human body tracking, occlusion, and large-scale augmentation where there needs to be a large-scale scanning.
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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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Pros
Google
  • Auto plane identification
  • Light and shadow detection
  • Anchoring things in augmented reality
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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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Cons
Google
  • It supports less android devices which is major problem.
  • Sometimes it takes time for plane or surface detection.
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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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Usability
Google
No answers on this topic
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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Support Rating
Google
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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Alternatives Considered
Google
Vuforia Engine has limited functionalities compared to ARCore. It has image-based detection and augmentation which requires users to have the anchor image with them for the augmentation to properly occur. ARCore solves that and it's one step less to reach the user and really convince them to try it.
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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.
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Return on Investment
Google
  • It has helped improve our client conversion rate
  • Increased customer satisfaction and winning customers from competition
  • Decreases TAT from consideration to ordering
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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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