When comparing Demina vs Spriter, the Slant community recommends Spriter for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D skeletal animation tools?” Spriter is ranked 3rd while Demina is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Spriter is:
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
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Pros
Pro Straightforward tutorials
Denima's user interface is very simple, and the primary documentation is a simple walk-through of the workflow.
Pro Open source
Demina is a C#/XNA application hosted on CodePlex under the Microsoft Public License.
Pro Quick and easy keyframe animation
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
Pro Easy configuration of character maps
Spriter makes it easy to change the character skin, and the animations persists.
Pro Integration for Unity3D and Construct 2
Modules supporting direct import of Spriter's SCML animations are available for Unity3D and Construct 2.
Pro Price
Price is a lot less than Spine for the pro version and goes on sales often.
Pro Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2
Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2.
Pro Has a Free and a Pro version
Pro Steam intergration
Steam integration is great for updates and tracking hour progression with the software.
Cons
Con No longer under development
The most recent update to Denima occurred in October 2012.
Con XNA-specific
Denima's runtime library is intended to integrate with the XNA framework, which has been unsupported since April 2014.
Con Sluggish performance with Unity Runtime
Con This version will never have 3D mess support
Yes, there will be a free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2 which will have this feature, but it will be years until that program is read as mentioned on the official site. The issue being that they do not have a way to program this in their current exported runtime. So, for not both Dragon Bones, Spine, and Blender, are the best options it seems for 3D mesh support which really adds something to game animations.
Con No hotkeys for stepping through animation frames
Stepping the animation forward and backward requires using the mouse, extremely inconvenient when fine-tuning motion paths.
Con No curved paths
All motion paths are linear. Curves have to be simulated by hand-placing additional keyframes.
Con Pro
Need knowledge in animator specification of profession