Codea vs Defold

Errors show up live, as you type. Smarter autocompletion picks up your local and global variables, including nested types. Everything else is just plain smarter, from indentation to highlighting.

Codea ships with three great music and sound packs, composed just for Codea and free for you to use in whatever you create.

Location library lets you make use of the GPS inside your iPad. Get your latitude, longitude, altitude and more with a dead-simple API designed specifically for Codea.

Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.

Software and online dashboard are free of charge.

You can do a lot with drag and drop, but you're not limited -- the code (Lua, which is easy to learn) allows you more power than just visual editing usually gives you.

Going from idea to result is very important for the creative process.

Being crossplatform it is important to work on low end devices.

A very active and friendly community in forums.

You can download and modify the source code of the Editor and the engine for free.

You can invite friends from the dashboard and create games together.

It allows you to change scripts in a game while it is running live. Common use-cases is to tweak gameplay parameters or to perform debugging on a running game.