When comparing Three.js vs Fabric.js, the Slant community recommends Fabric.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript drawing libraries?” Fabric.js is ranked 8th while Three.js is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Fabric.js is:
Fabric supports node.js, and has an npm package available for server side rendering with all the dependencies handled for you. This allows you to provide graceful degradation for image fallbacks to canvas or SVG content.
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Pros
Pro Feature rich
Effects: Anaglyph, cross-eyed and parallax barrier.
Scenes: add and remove objects at run-time; fog
Cameras: perspective and orthographic; controllers: trackball, FPS, path and more
Animation: armatures, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, morph and keyframe
Lights: ambient, direction, point and spot lights; shadows: cast and receive
Materials: Lambert, Phong, Standard, smooth shading, textures, PBR and more
Shaders: access to full OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) capabilities: lens flare, depth pass and extensive post-processing library
Objects: meshes, particles, sprites, lines, ribbons, bones and more - all with Level of detail
Geometry: plane, cube, sphere, torus, 3D text and more; modifiers: lathe, extrude and tube
Data loaders: binary, image, JSON and scene
Utilities: full set of time and 3D math functions including frustum, matrix, quaternion, UVs and more
Export and import: utilities to create Three.js-compatible JSON files from within: Blender, openCTM, FBX, Max, and OBJ
Support: API documentation, public forum
Examples: Over 150 files of coding examples plus fonts, models, textures, sounds and other support files
Pro Well documented
The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available.
Pro Helpful and friendly community
Thanks to the recently introduced forum, it is easy to find a community of helpful developers.
Pro Support for physically based rendering
With the introduction of the new MeshStandardMaterial, three.js support physically based rendering (PBR) out of the box allowing for real life quality material and lighting.
Pro Support for most industry standard file formats
Three.js has importers for most of the industry standard files format (obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, playcanvas, stl, vrml, draco and many more), making it easy to author assets in your favourite modelling software and import them for use them in three.js.
Pro Actively developed
Three.js has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
Pro Fallback canvas rendering
Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available.
Pro Support for special effects and postprocessing
Three.js support many special effects and post-processing filters including particles, lensflare, sprites, real time reflection and refraction and even area based lighting.
Pro Hundreds of officially maintained plugins, extensions, control systems, importers, exporters and special effects
The core of the three.js system is kept to a minimum to reduce file size, however there are also hundreds of extensions maintained in the offical repo on github, along with many free textures, fonts and models. You can find them all here.
Pro Plenty of tutorials and examples
Three.js official documentation provides plenty of well-written examples with a wide variety of tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
Pro Out of the box Node.js support
Fabric supports node.js, and has an npm package available for server side rendering with all the dependencies handled for you. This allows you to provide graceful degradation for image fallbacks to canvas or SVG content.
Pro Vector focused API
Drawing objects in fabric are vector focused, so everything is easily transformable. It makes it easy to create complex pathed shapes, add gradients, or filters. Although fabric is great for vector rendering, it also has image support as well.
Pro Outputs to canvas and SVG and JSON
When it comes to format compatibility, Fabric is the best, with the ability to output to Canvas, SVG, and JSON. SVG provides backwards compatibility for older browsers, and JSON allows you to store rendered output for later use.
Pro Great interaction with SVG, excellent coding
If you are about to customize the library to your needs, this is the project of choice! Great programming work!
Pro Good support for SVG multi-line text
Allows creating multi-line text that can even be interactively edited by user interaction.
Pro Browser only version now available
If the node-canvas dependency is a problem you can now look for npm install fabric@x.y.z-browser
Cons
Con Lack of versioning system means that the API changes frequently
Three.js releases a new revision about once a month, and the API can change at any time. This means that a lot of third party help found online is out of date.
Con Weak visual tools
Three.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed. It does not support a lot of engine features.
Con No front-end only version via Node
NPM package has major dependencies.