When comparing Source vs Armory3D, the Slant community recommends Armory3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Armory3D is ranked 10th while Source is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose Armory3D is:
Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Runs inside Blender
Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!
Pro State of the art physically based rendering
Physically based
Cycles material nodes
Voxel-based global illumination
Temporal anti-aliasing
Tessellated displacement
Screen-space raymarching
HDR pipeline
Pro Free and open source
Pro Easy to use
Pro Node based programming and materials support
Pro Lightweight
Pro Export to multiple platforms
Export to all platform that Kha supports.
Pro A good community
Although the is an obvious lake of community help, it is still there if you look on the Armory forum or there discord your sure to find help for any problem you have.
Pro A growing community with more tutorials and documentation.
Although Armory has been a little slow in the development, tutorials on YouTube are being released almost daily and the documentation is also being updated regularly.
Pro No programing experience needed
Cons
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.
Con Lack of documentation
Con Not many developers use it
Armory3d seems to be quite exotic and it should be hard to find developers to help in projects.
Con Still in development
Con Slow development
Focus from the developer has shifted to another project, so development of this has slowed considerably.
Con Good looking but a terrible choice for any serious development
Terrible lack of support and lack of a serious delivery strategy. Multiple breaking changes to the master branches (usually the only branch actually) from the core projects as well as the myriad of dependencies it uses make it a nightmare to have something stable to create with. Might be good for prototyping if you stick to the releases, but stay away if you are planning to create something serious.