When comparing UDK vs Source, the Slant community recommends UDK for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” UDK is ranked 17th while Source is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose UDK is:
UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Large toolset
UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.
Pro Triple A track record
UDK is an engine used by many big name companies for popular games such as the Gears of War series.
Pro Great documentation
Valve's official documentation website is great for newbies. It demonstrates the pros and cons of the engine (and since the website isn't maintained by Valve, but instead the community, the pros and cons are largely unbiased). There are also a number of pages dedicated to entities used within official Valve games and also community-made mods that were turned into full-fledged games by Valve. These pages explain the ins and outs of how most source programming works. There are also guides for Valve's tools which are both included in Source SDK and in any Valve-developed game.
Pro Runs on every potato pc
Since it has precalculated lighting, this engine is great for low end PCs too.
Pro Many basic entities
You don't need to code your own door or ladder etc. You can pretty much use every entity used in Half-Life 2 yourself easily.
Pro Visual logic, no programming
Of course you can program stuff into source but for level design only, source has a really easy input/output system for your level logic (e.g. doors, trigger when player walks into room...).
Pro Has a built-in video capture and editing application
Source includes Source Filmmaker, a video capture and editing application.
Pro Easy way to export or load source models to unity and maps
Cons
Con Superseded by Unreal Engine 4
Con DevKit only runs on Windows
Even though UDK can deploy games to run on multiple platforms, including Mac, it does not feature support for development on Mac.
Con Limits games to FPS
UDK was originally developed for the FPS, "Unreal Tournament", and it certainly shows. While UDK is a very powerful engine, it takes quite a bit of work to make it do something other than an FPS.
Con Only for mods
Normally, you can only use the Source Engine to develop "source-mods" (as Steam calls them), however the developer wiki is correct in saying Valve have a proven track-record for finding source-mods and turning them into fully-fledged games, Black Mesa Source is a good example of this, as it began life as a source-mod available for free, however Valve turned it into a fully-fledged and paid game.
Con SDK is outdated and difficult to use
Source SDK has not been updated in ages, and has instead been "re-released" under different names, e.g "Source SDK 2013 Singleplayer".
It's honestly easier to use the version of SDK included with any Source game, namely Portal 2 or DOTA 2, since both have a variant of Source SDK that is more updated than anything you can find in the tools section of Steam.