When comparing Scratch vs Defold, the Slant community recommends Defold for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Defold is ranked 27th while Scratch is ranked 71st. The most important reason people chose Defold is:
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Visual
Code is represented as visual building blocks that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
Pro Great starting point for kids
Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.
Pro Easy to learn
Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.
Pro No need to be able to type
Pro Can be used to create games
Pro Highly structured
The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.
Pro Easy to learn
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Pro Collaborative
You can invite friends from the dashboard and create games together.
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 Visual editor
Pro Fast results
Going from idea to result is very important for the creative process.
Pro Easy and fast export for various platforms
Pro Very performant
Being crossplatform it is important to work on low end devices.
Pro Great community
A very active and friendly community in forums.
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.
Cons
Con Does not teach you programming
Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.
Con Won't get you a job
Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.
Con Google account needed
You need a Google account to develop with Defold.