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What are the best JavaScript 3D frameworks?

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Three.js vs Babylon.js vs PlayCanvas

 vs p5.js vs CopperLicht vs Pre3d vs JS3D vs BabylonHx vs Canvas 3D JS Library

Specs

Rendering

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3D

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2D

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Rendering

Physically based rendering

Tech

WebGL1/2 + JavaScript or TypeScript

Special FX

particles, postprocesses, lens, glow, etc..

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Price

Free to Use & Open Source

Supported platforms

Any Browser on Windows, MacOS, and Linux

Dev platforms

Windows, Linux, MacOS

Mobile targets

Android, iOS

Supported languages

JavaScript, HTML5

3D

Yes

2D

Yes

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Pros + Cons

Pro
 Well documented

The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available.
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Pro
 Helpful and friendly community

Thanks to the recently introduced forum, it is easy to find a community of helpful developers.
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Pro
 Plenty of tutorials and examples

Three.js official documentation provides plenty of well-written examples with a wide variety of tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
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Pro
 Hundreds of officially maintained plugins, extensions, control systems, importers, exporters and special effects

The core of the three.js system is kept to a minimum to reduce file size, however there are also hundreds of extensions maintained in the offical repo on github, along with many free textures, fonts and models. You can find them all here.
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Pro
 Support for special effects and postprocessing

Three.js support many special effects and post-processing filters including particles, lensflare, sprites, real time reflection and refraction and even area based lighting.
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Pro
 Actively developed

Three.js has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
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Pro
 Support for most industry standard file formats

Three.js has importers for most of the industry standard files format (obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, playcanvas, stl, vrml, draco and many more), making it easy to author assets in your favourite modelling software and import them for use them in three.js.
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Pro
 Feature rich

Effects: Anaglyph, cross-eyed and parallax barrier. Scenes: add and remove objects at run-time; fog Cameras: perspective and orthographic; controllers: trackball, FPS, path and more Animation: armatures, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, morph and keyframe Lights: ambient, direction, point and spot lights; shadows: cast and receive Materials: Lambert, Phong, Standard, smooth shading, textures, PBR and more Shaders: access to full OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) capabilities: lens flare, depth pass and extensive post-processing library Objects: meshes, particles, sprites, lines, ribbons, bones and more - all with Level of detail Geometry: plane, cube, sphere, torus, 3D text and more; modifiers: lathe, extrude and tube Data loaders: binary, image, JSON and scene Utilities: full set of time and 3D math functions including frustum, matrix, quaternion, UVs and more Export and import: utilities to create Three.js-compatible JSON files from within: Blender, openCTM, FBX, Max, and OBJ Support: API documentation, public forum Examples: Over 150 files of coding examples plus fonts, models, textures, sounds and other support files
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Con
 Weak visual tools

Three.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed. It does not support a lot of engine features.
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Con
 Lack of versioning system means that the API changes frequently

Three.js releases a new revision about once a month, and the API can change at any time. This means that a lot of third party help found online is out of date.
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Pro
 Fallback canvas rendering

Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available.
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Pro
 Lots of users, big community

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Con
 Poor garbage collection

Memory is quite slow to free up with three.js, causing issues with the performance of the project.
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Pro
 Small (but helpful) community

Thanks to the increasing popularity of Babylon, it has a growing community of helpful developers. It's easy to find help on their forum.
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Pro
 A good amount of easy to understand resources to learn from

Babylon provides a playground where you can explore examples and play with the code. The official documentation offers a wide variety of well-written tutorials on topics from beginner to advanced. Additionally, there are many tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
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Pro
 Great base shader material

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Pro
 Actively developed

Babylon has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
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Con
 Young project

Babylon is quite young compared to many of it's competitors (released in 2013). The community is still somewhat small, however growing quickly.
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Con
 Still evolving

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Pro
 Rendering engine runs on the browser

Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser.
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Pro
 Powerful assets pipeline

Assets and content delivery is very different on a web platform comparing to native. So PlayCanvas challenges best practices to allow developers decide how their content is delivered and in what form. Async Assets download allows developers to load content as the app goes, instead of asking to download all assets in advance risking users to simply navigate away while staring at loading screens. Formats for 3D models and textures support covers all the popular tools. And the workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping your files right into the Assets Panel. The cloud will do the rest of the hard work optimizing and converting your files into runtime-friendly and compressed data.
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Pro
 Integrated physics engine

PlayCanvas lets users integrate physics in their game rather easily, using the powerful Bullet Physics Engine (ammo.js). Should also be noted that the physics engine is delivered as an optional library, so by default being disabled it does not add any extra download size to your apps.
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Pro
 Friendly and active community

PlayCanvas has Feed as homepage for registered users, listing Dev Logs of other developers. This allows to socialize with other developers like yourself in a twitter-like environment. More to that, there is also an active forum, where developers help each other to solve their challenges. Developers of PlayCanvas itself are always looking forward to chat and help the community with any problems that may arise.
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Pro
 Real-time collaborative online editor tool

PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.
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Pro
 Open source

PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development.
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Pro
 Has a free tier

Engine is free for projects under 200MB and with no more than 2 people on a team. The free tier has no engine restrictions. Tools are totally free too. There are no special limiting features behind any paywalls, and free users have all the features as paid users. There are no royalties associated with publishing your apps and games - you've made them, you own them. It is free to publish to playcanvas.com as well, just by one click in Editor.
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Pro
 Accessible documentation

Reference documentation and lots of examples are available directly on the website.
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Con
 No built-in rendering

If looking for something to build UIs with or similar, one might be disappointed by the lack of any pre-defined UI element objects and such in p5.js. One has to write all the rendering code for any objects one includes, integrating it appropriately with the loop.
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Pro
 Great community

p5 users benefit from the Processing community's 15+ years of growth and discovery. Processing code can easily be converted to p5.
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Pro
 Cross platform

As this is written in Haxe, it not only targets JS, but can also target mobile and desktop platforms.
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