When comparing SFML vs Oxygine, the Slant community recommends Oxygine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Oxygine is ranked 18th while SFML is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Oxygine is:
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very efficient and usable
Pro Zlib/PNG license
In short, SFML is free for any use (commercial or personal, proprietary or open-source). You can use SFML in your project without any restriction. You can even omit to mention that you use SFML -- although it would be appreciated.
Pro Can be combined with OpenGL
If you hate something about the way SFML handles graphics, you can just combine it with OpenGL. It's completely smooth and works as expected, without any additional dependencies.
Pro Active community and wiki
You can ask questions on their own personal forum which is full of users, and their wiki is constantly being maintained. They even have an IRC.
Pro Works on every platform
SFML 2.2 brought forth Android & iOS functionality, and SFML games work on Linux, Mac and Windows out of the box, since SFML is written with OpenGL.

Pro Great documentation
SFML is very well documented, even with short examples of use for many functions and modules. Furthermore, there are books like 'SFML essentials' and 'SFML for game development' which teach you how to use this library to its fullest.
Pro Good for OpenGL
If you are thinking about using OpenGL, look no further, you can open a window, and handle events in less than 15 lines, and it provides input, time, and even networking, plus alot more. It has become my favorite c++ library :D
Pro Great library
SFML is a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of. The API provides tons of good documentation and is very straightforward to use. You can get a game up and running with SFML quite quickly and with minimal effort.
Pro Clean code
An SFML project's code-base is usually clean and easy to read. All public SFML classes are under the namespace "sf" so it is easy to tell which code is yours and which belongs to SFML (of course you can stop this by typing using namespace sf;
).
Pro Available in many languages
There's support for many languages besides C++, current supported languages are: C, .NET, Crystal, D, Euphoria, Go, Java, Julia, Nim, OCaml, Pascal, Python, Ruby and Rust, and this list is constantly growing.
Pro Beginner-friendly
SFML is extremely beginner friendly and even provides pre-built libraries for your IDE of choice on Windows. Besides the fact that it's extremely well documented, they also have a set of tutorials that walk you through every module.
Pro Modern C++11 implementation
SFML is one of the few good C++ frameworks out there to actually make full use of the language. It's extremely well optimized and it plays well with anything you throw at it.
Pro Games can be built as HTML5 applications
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Pro Functionality can be extended with a bunch of available extenions
All of them available publicly at github.
- oxygine-movie for playing Theora movies with alpha channel
- oxygine-sound player for ogg sound/music with streaming
- oxygine-freetype library
- oxygine-billing for in-app-purchases on Android/iOS
- oxygine-spine for playing Spine animations
- oxygine-magicparticles for playing particles made with MagicParticles
Pro Will be familiar to users of ActionScript3/Flash API
If you are familiar with ActionScript3/Flash API, then you will find it easy to begin working in Oxygine. Oxygine is much like Flash in C++, as its Event Handling model is very close to that of ActionScript 3 and SceneGraph.
Pro Easy to use C++ API with optional C++11 features
Oxygine is written in C++. It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates.
Pro Free, open source and cross-platform
Oxygine is a free framework that works on OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5. It's licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Robust
It's very rare to experience bugs with Oxygine.
Pro Allows playing movies with alpha channel
Using oxygine-movie extension for Oxygine you could play in your game any videos encoded with Theora codec.
You movie could have alpha channel and used as simple sprite instead of classic spreadsheet animations.
Pro Allows for flexible contol over draw processes
Pro Fast
Cons
Con Relatively slow
Compared to SDL2, GLFW, it is slow.
Con No GUI editor or IDE
Does not include any IDE or media editor. It's purely source code.
Con May take longer to learn and understand
Con Messy sprite management
Sprites retain all of the operations applied to them, whether that be a new position or a rotation. This makes sprite management somewhat annoying.
Con Not specifically a 2D game engine
It isn't really an engine, more of a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of.
Con Inactive
The project does not seem to be active: there has been no new commit since mid-2019, the Twitter feed for the engine stopped posting news in 2018, and the forum is offline as of May 2021.
Con Little community support
Oxygine is a young framework. It was first released in 2013 and has yet to gather a large community. As of February 2016, the forum had just 123 members.
Con Not many tutorials available
There are not many tutorials available that teach developers on how to make a game with Oxygine from scratch. Because of this, it may be harder to pick it up or to start learning game development by using this engine.
