Spine vs 2D Toolkit
When comparing Spine vs 2D Toolkit, the Slant community recommends Spine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D animation tools for Unity?” Spine is ranked 2nd while 2D Toolkit is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Spine is:
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
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Pros
Pro Integration libraries support most engines
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
Pro Simplified UI allows for an easy learning curve
No-nonsense workflow allows you to create your artwork in programs much better suited for the task like Illustrator and Inkscape for example, while Spine itself focuses only on the important task of skeletal animation.
Pro Allows for easy use of artwork from third party programs
Spine's developers provide scripts which makes exporting artwork from third party programs much easier to do.
Pro Community-driven feature roadmap
Esoteric Software maintains public Waffle issue trackers to help plan and prioritize feature additions.
Pro Funded via Kickstarter
Spine received resounding support from Kickstarter backers, beating its pledge goal by over 5 times. A second successful Kickstarter added meshes and other important features.
Pro Price high for this product
Pro Good documentation
The documentation for the toolkit is well written and there are video tutorials as well as an active community.
Pro Includes source code
No need to pay more to get access to the source code.
Pro Pixel-perfect camera
Pixel games in the style of 8 or 16 bit systems need to have each pixel uniform on the screen which 2D Toolkit supports with a camera component.
Pro Add colliders in the atlas editor
Choose from either a box, sphere, or mesh collider that will output as either a 3D or 2D collider in Unity.
Pro Create different resolutions of atlas
2D Toolkit allows for different sizes of atlas from 1x, 2x, or 4x which can be changed depending on platform resolution.
Pro Built to work inside Unity
2D Toolkit is an editor extension so users don’t have to leave the Unity engine for tile mapping.
Pro Create Atlases within the tool
Create sprite sheets for tiles to save draw calls and to keep tilesets organized.
Pro Supports the Tiled TMX Format
Create tilemaps in Tiled and implement with 2D Toolkit.
Cons
Con Spine Professional is expensive
Spine Essential includes nearly all features, except IK, weights, and meshes. Spine Professional is expensive, though it does give all future updates for life (Spine is updated very often).
Con Requires EVERY developer to have a license
Ever developer needs a license, not just the animator, or an overall license for the project. The license agreement is extremely restrictive.
Con Doesn't support gamemaker 2.3
Con No integration for lesser known engines
Spine does not directly support some game engines, such as Construct 2 or Clickteam Fusion.
Con Doesn't integrate with Unity's Sprite system
2D Toolkit provides a completely proprietary sprite implementation. Though it can be used alongside Unity's 2D systems, the two are completely separate and require different code to utilize.