When comparing Defold vs OpenBOR, the Slant community recommends Defold for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for beginners and non-programmers?” Defold is ranked 21st while OpenBOR is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose Defold is:
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to learn
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Pro Completely free of charge
Software and online dashboard are free of charge.
Pro Good combination of visual editing + code (Lua)
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.
Pro Fast results
Going from idea to result is very important for the creative process.
Pro Visual editor
Pro Very performant
Being crossplatform it is important to work on low end devices.
Pro Easy and fast export for various platforms
Pro Great community
A very active and friendly community in forums.
Pro Source code available
You can download and modify the source code of the Editor and the engine for free.
Pro Collaborative
You can invite friends from the dashboard and create games together.
Pro Hot reload
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.
Pro With a bit of tweaking, it's also possible to create a platformer
It's possible for a non-programmer who is comfortable with text-based designing to tweak the engine in order to create a platformer. Almost all the parameters needed can be found in the OpenBOR wiki, so it's easy to find anything a new developer needs.
Pro Great genre-specific engine
OpenBOR can quickly help create a good Beat-Em-Up game without programming.
Pro Great, supportive community
OpenBOR community is highly active and very helpful.
Cons
Con Text-based parametric editing
Heavy reliance on text-editing. No visual editor to edit characters and levels (although there are a few community-built ones that do the job).