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What are the best JavaScript game engines?

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9 Options Considered

9 Options ConsideredPriceLanguagesLicense
Babylon.js
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Phaser
––
Impact
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Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family
C++; Lua; JavaScriptMIT
Crafty
Javascript–
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Babylon.js

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Jonathan
Sascha Siemer
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.
Sascha Siemer
Top Pro

Powerful 3D Framework using WebGL

•••
Jonathan
Top Pro

Support for native exporters for 3dsMax, Blender3d and Unity3D

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Babylon.js files can be produced directly from well-known designer tools.
Jonathan
Top Pro

Actively developed

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

Playground

•••
Babylon.js comes with a really powerful playground page where you can try and learn with your browser only.
Jonathan
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 doi...
Jonathan
Top Pro

Support for physically based rendering

•••
PBR rendering techniques aim to simulate real life lighting.
Jonathan
Top Pro

Sponsored by Microsoft

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Microsoft supports server side services, such as Playground.
Jonathan
Top Pro

Simplicity as a foundation

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Babylon.js is developed from the ground up to be extremely easy to use. Documentation site is kept up to date.
Jonathan
Top Pro

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

•••
Jonathan
Top Pro

Support for special effects

•••
Babylon.js supports particles, lens flares, postprocesses, realtime reflection and refraction.
Jonathan
Top Pro

Excellent extensions

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Extensions can be viewed here.
Jonathan
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.
Andrew Butt
Laura Kyle
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.
Jonathan
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.
Jonathan
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 15 more Pros & ConsSee 15 more Pros & Cons

Phaser

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Andris Pelcbergs
Theodore Lief Gannon
Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

•••
Phaser keeps things simple and as such is easy to use by beginners.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Poor code structure 

•••
There's little in terms of cohesiveness in classes, methods or patterns.

Impact

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Andris Pelcbergs
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Extendable

•••
Many plugins are available, including one called Impact++ which adds features like pathfinding and dynamic lighting.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Level editor  

•••
Built-in map editor with support for tiling, collision layers, and actors.
Andris Pelcbergs
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
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 tr...
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Cost of $99

•••
While most HTML5 frameworks are offered as free open source projects, ImpactJS has a one time cost and no free option.
See 4 more ProsSee 4 more Pros

Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family

Monika
Luis Cruz
Top Pro

Mobile native performance

•••
Create games with javascript and export it to Android/iOS with very good performance.
Know any negative aspects of this option?

Crafty

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Know any positive aspects of this option?
Francisco
MellowAkaManah
Top Con

No WebGL renderer

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

Starling JS

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Andris Pelcbergs
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Free and open source

•••
Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Strong community support

•••
Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Early in development

•••
No stable release of JavaScript version of Starling has yet been released.
See 2 more ProsSee 2 more Pros

CreateJS

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Platino

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GameQuery

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Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Tiled support

•••
Natively integrates Tiled map editor. Tiled is a free, open-source map editor that supports orthogonal, isometric and staggered maps.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Abandoned

•••
Last update to the plugin was made in 2013.

53 Community Recommendations

Ian Sheehan
Matuska László
David Rousset
Sascha Siemer
Rahman Nasimi Asl
Влад Машкин
Marian Gaje
Andrew Butt
Luis Cruz
Nepo Quell
David Catuhe
+37
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Request recommendations from the community
SuccinctIdyia
SuccinctIdyia
Contributor for a month
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0
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Phaser
Recommended a month ago
I made a lot of game with ! Phaser is my life!
Pro
 Beginner-friendly
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Luis Cruz
Luis
Contributor for 7 months
3
Total 
Recs.
55
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Karma
Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family
Recommended 5 months ago
Cocos Creator and Cocos2d-x has an excellent support for javascript, actually you can code the entire game in javascript and export to multiple platforms.
Pro
 Mobile native performance
See full
Currently displaying 2 out of 53 total recommendations.
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