What are the best JavaScript game engines?

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score 46 · Accepted Answer

Babylon.js

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Top Pro

Actively developed

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

Specs

Tech:WebGL1/2 + JavaScript or TypeScript

Special FX:particles, postprocesses, lens, glow, etc..

Rendering:Physically based rendering

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best 1 of 15 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Babylon.js

My Recommendation for Babylon.js

Actively developed

Weak visual tools

Powerful 3D Framework using WebGL

Young project

Helpful and friendly community

Support for native exporters for 3dsMax, Blender3d and Unity3D

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

Sponsored by Microsoft

Playground

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

Plenty of tutorials and examples

Support for physically based rendering

Support for special effects

Excellent extensions

Simplicity as a foundation

ShaderBuilder makes any shader in JavaScript

Open source

14 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Phaser

My Recommendation for Phaser

Beginner-friendly

Poor documentation for Phaser 3

Extensive support for texture atlases and loading all kinds of content

Poor code structure

Open sourced

Poorly designed API; exposes everything

Targets mobile browsers

Difficult to make the viewport responsive

Built in camera support

My Recommendation for GDevelop

My Recommendation for GDevelop

Free and open-source

Still needs more tutorials

Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android

Behaviours of Objects are rather generalized

New documentation for gd5 is good for starting

No support for atlas/tilemap and character animation sheet

Open source plugin SDK

No cross-compiler

Lots of features to build games

Support both native and HTML5 games (web and mobile development)

Multilanguage support

Quickly add behaviors to objects

Powerful events system to create games without programming

Easy to use

Gdevelop non programming skills required

My Recommendation for Crafty

My Recommendation for Crafty

No WebGL renderer

My Recommendation for Pixi.js

My Recommendation for Pixi.js

Will be familiar to ActionScript developers

Not a complete solution

Supports WebGL w/ canvas fallback

My Recommendation for CreateJS

My Recommendation for CreateJS

My Recommendation for PlayCanvas

My Recommendation for PlayCanvas

Integrated physics engine

Must have Internet.

Open source

Cross-platform support

Loads extremely fast

Very easy to use

Rendering engine runs on the browser

Powerful assets pipeline

Real-time collaborative online editor tool

Has hot code reloading

My Recommendation for Three.js

My Recommendation for Three.js

My Recommendation for Impact

My Recommendation for Impact

Not being maintained

Excellent collision detection system

Extendable

Level editor

Extensive documentation available to support development