Defold vs Flax Engine

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.

Can be used for free until you hit a rather high revenue cap, at which point you have to pay royalties.

C# scripting is really well made, comparable to Unity, but without any of the legacy cruft.

Supports most platforms, including Windows, Linux, Android, Nintendo Switch, ...

Has a very modern, performant and beautiful rendering backend.

The entire core is written in C++ and it supports writing game code in C++. The interoperability between C# and C++ is also nothing to scoff at.

Works with any text editor and comes with proper support for Visual Studio, VSCode and Jetbrains Rider.

The documentation is well written, up to date and accepts improvements from the community.

The editor is both powerful and simple. My favourite part is how easy it is to extend the editor with custom magic.

The entire source of the engine is available on Github, though not under an open source license.