When comparing Neo Textures vs Filter Forge, the Slant community recommends Neo Textures for most people. In the question“What are the best programs to create procedural textures?” Neo Textures is ranked 4th while Filter Forge is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Neo Textures is:
Can easily modify all of the multipliers and alligorithm values of procedural generation.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful control on procedural nodes
Can easily modify all of the multipliers and alligorithm values of procedural generation.
Pro Faster than Substance Designer
Pro Open-source
Neo Textures editor is a free and open source project available on SourceForge.
Pro Not only a Photoshop plugin, has a lot of other hosts
Pro Several filters
Filter Forge includes a lot of filters and each of them has several presets. Filters are grouped into different categories (Organic, Patterns, Creative, Distortions, Photo, etc...) so it's easy to locate them.
Pro Large online library of filters
The website has thousands of filters available for download. This is the only thing that makes the basic edition feasible.
Pro Standalone application or PhotoShop plugin
Filter Forge can be used as both a standalone application and as a plugin for PhotoShop.
Cons
Con No longer being developed
Neo Textures is no longer being developed. The project seems to be abandoned.
Con Doesn't support PBR
Neo Textures was created before PBR was a thing, and it's based on the deprecated Diffuse/Specular rendering pipeline, which is no longer used.
Con Lot of bugs
Con Slow development cycle
New versions come fast enough, but for example, the beta version of 7 doesn't have a lot that 4 didn't have.
Con No free tier
Filter Forge is not free. The basic edition (cheapest one) is $149. It does go on sale regularly though for around $30.
Con Hefty price tag
Its $399 for the professional version, whereas a big competitor used by large studios is only $149.