When comparing Irrlicht vs Crystal Space 3D, the Slant community recommends Crystal Space 3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Crystal Space 3D is ranked 44th while Irrlicht is ranked 49th. The most important reason people chose Crystal Space 3D is:
Scripting language biddings are available via swig, supposedly any swig target could be used If you are okay with building, and probably maintaining, the project for your own needs then you may be able to build bindings for your favorite scripting platform. As noted in a slant "con", there are no binary releases, including no prebuilt bindings.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of examples and docs
Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets.

Pro Free and open source

Pro Good polymorphic design
If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking.

Pro Lightweight
Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.
Pro Easy to entry level C++ experience
If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time.
Pro Support for multiple formats
This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.
Pro Scripting language bindings (via swig) python, perl, tcl
Scripting language biddings are available via swig, supposedly any swig target could be used If you are okay with building, and probably maintaining, the project for your own needs then you may be able to build bindings for your favorite scripting platform.
As noted in a slant "con", there are no binary releases, including no prebuilt bindings.
Pro Cross platform
Runs on all major desktop platforms.
Cons

Con Outdated
Obsolete over 5 years ago. While the engine is being worked on with plans for new features and support, the movement is slow, leaving many engines far more advanced in certain areas.
Con Not a game engine
This is a 3D graphics engine similar to Ogre3D. Thus, it doesn't provide any pathfinding or physics support. Support for those will have to be added by the dev.
Con No binary releases.
Expect to compile this from source if your want to play with it.
Ubuntu has a package for it, but that package appears to be missing it's scripting language bindings. I expect the build is also quite old and i fear may be dropped in coming Ubuntu releases.
