What are the best JavaScript game engines?

Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.

score 29 · Answer 1

Babylon.js

Add Video or Image

Top Pro

Helpful and friendly 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. See More

Top Con

Weak visual tools

Babylon.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed and does not support a lot of features of engine. See More

Top Pro

Powerful 3D Framework using WebGL

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Support for native exporters for 3dsMax, Blender3d and Unity3D

Babylon.js files can be produced directly from well-known designer tools. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed

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

Top Pro

Has a built-in WebGL 2D Engine to build UI in screen space or inside the 3D world

The Canvas2D feature is a 100% WebGL based 2D Engine which allows to draw text, sprite, primitives (rectangle, ellipsis, complex lines..) with the possibility to interact and animate them. It also feature a grouping feature, positioning using margin/padding/alignment and different layout engine to position/size the 2D components. The Canvas2D can be create in Screen Space: over the 3D Scene, useful for UI or in WorldSpace as a rectangle which will be drawn into the 3D scene like any other kind of 3D objects. See More

Top Pro

Playground

Babylon.js comes with a really powerful playground page where you can try and learn with your browser only. See More

Top Pro

Plenty of tutorials and examples

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. See More

Top Pro

Support for physically based rendering

PBR rendering techniques aim to simulate real life lighting. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity as a foundation

Babylon.js is developed from the ground up to be extremely easy to use. Documentation site is kept up to date. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box physics engine support (Cannon.js, OIMO.js)

Top Pro

Support for special effects

Babylon.js supports particles, lens flares, postprocesses, realtime reflection and refraction. See More

Top Pro

Excellent extensions

Extensions can be viewed here. See More

Top Pro

ShaderBuilder makes any shader in JavaScript

ShaderBuilder, a Babylon extension, is a shader text builder with useful functions that allows you a lot of flexibility when making shaders. See More

Top Pro

Open source

You would have to pay for on other platforms what is readily available for free, with the right amount of personal effort. See More

See All

score 15 · Answer 2

Phaser

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

Phaser keeps things simple and as such is easy to use by beginners. See More

Top Con

Poor code structure

There's little in terms of cohesiveness in classes, methods or patterns. Forced OOP structure over JavaScript prototype s See More

Top Pro

Targets mobile browsers

Built specifically for mobile web browsers. See More

Top Con

Poor documentation

See All

score 7 · Answer 3

Impact

Top Pro

Excellent collision detection system

Impact provides 2 types of collision detection; static and dynamic collisions. Both of which are easily integrated into game development. See More

Top Pro

Extendable

Many plugins are available, including one called Impact++ which adds features like pathfinding and dynamic lighting. See More

Top Pro

Level editor

Built-in map editor with support for tiling, collision layers, and actors. See More

Top Pro

Extensive documentation available to support development

ImpactJS has an active user community that busily produces tremendous resources including videos, books, tutorials, walkthroughs and more. There are also comprehensive class documentation available. See More

Top Pro

Truly cross-platform allowing developers to build for anything

Extending the reach of a game developed with ImpactJS is easy due to the cross-platform nature the framework. There are Considerations around performance, resolution and audio, however all can be appropriately addressed when in development. Works in the browser via Canvas, even on mobile. Easily translatable into a packaged app. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 4

Crafty

Top Con

No WebGL renderer

Doesn't support WebGL renderer, only Canvas and DOM. See More

Specs

Languages:Javascript

score 1 · Answer 5

Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family

Top Pro

Mobile native performance

Create games with javascript and export it to Android/iOS with very good performance. See More

Specs

Languages:C++; Lua; JavaScript

License:MIT

Dev platforms:Windows; macOS

Desktop targets:Windows; macOS

See All Specs >

score 2 · Answer 6

Starling JS

Top Pro

Lightweight

Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything - but what it does, as efficient as possible. See More

Top Con

Early in development

No stable release of JavaScript version of Starling has yet been released. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub. See More

Top Pro

Strong community support

Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 7

CreateJS

Add Video or Image

Answer 8

Platino

Add Video or Image

Answer 9

GameQuery

Top Pro

Tiled support

Natively integrates Tiled map editor. Tiled is a free, open-source map editor that supports orthogonal, isometric and staggered maps. See More

Top Con

Abandoned

Last update to the plugin was made in 2013. See More

9 Options Considered

Helpful and friendly community

Weak visual tools

Powerful 3D Framework using WebGL

Young project

Support for native exporters for 3dsMax, Blender3d and Unity3D

Actively developed

Has a built-in WebGL 2D Engine to build UI in screen space or inside the 3D world

Playground

Plenty of tutorials and examples

Support for physically based rendering

Sponsored by Microsoft

Simplicity as a foundation

Out of the box physics engine support (Cannon.js, OIMO.js)

Support for special effects

Excellent extensions

ShaderBuilder makes any shader in JavaScript

Open source

Beginner-friendly

Poor code structure

Targets mobile browsers

Poor documentation

Excellent collision detection system

Extendable

Level editor

Extensive documentation available to support development

Truly cross-platform allowing developers to build for anything

No WebGL renderer

Mobile native performance

Lightweight

Early in development

Free and open source

Strong community support

Tiled support

Abandoned

Don't see your favorite option? Add it.

60 Community Recommendations

One sec!