When comparing PlayCanvas vs GDevelop, the Slant community recommends GDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” GDevelop is ranked 2nd while PlayCanvas is ranked 65th. The most important reason people chose GDevelop is:
The whole interface is intuitive and easy to learn: each part of the game can be designed using visual editors. The objects editor is used to create the objects of the game, the scene editor help you to build the levels of your game and the events editor allows to give life to the whole game without programming.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Real-time collaborative online editor tool
PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.
Pro Powerful assets pipeline
Assets and content delivery is very different on a web platform comparing to native. So PlayCanvas challenges best practices to allow developers decide how their content is delivered and in what form.
Async Assets download allows developers to load content as the app goes, instead of asking to download all assets in advance risking users to simply navigate away while staring at loading screens.
Formats for 3D models and textures support covers all the popular tools. And the workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping your files right into the Assets Panel. The cloud will do the rest of the hard work optimizing and converting your files into runtime-friendly and compressed data.
Pro Rendering engine runs on the browser
Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser.
Pro Avoids having to download lots of textures for lightmaps
Lightmaps are an efficient way to deliver lighting to your scenes for a long time. But they come with the cost of large textures. PlayCanvas offers a unique solution for a web platform, it renders lightmaps when an app is loading in runtime.
This is faster than downloading MBs of textures. And it's much more convenient: simply switch your light sources to bake, and static models to be lightmapped, and the engine will do the rest.
Pro Friendly and active community
PlayCanvas has Feed as homepage for registered users, listing Dev Logs of other developers. This allows to socialize with other developers like yourself in a twitter-like environment.
More to that, there is also an active forum, where developers help each other to solve their challenges.
Developers of PlayCanvas itself are always looking forward to chat and help the community with any problems that may arise.
Pro Integrated physics engine
PlayCanvas lets users integrate physics in their game rather easily, using the powerful Bullet Physics Engine (ammo.js). Should also be noted that the physics engine is delivered as an optional library, so by default being disabled it does not add any extra download size to your apps.
Pro Has a free tier
Engine is free for projects under 200MB and with no more than 2 people on a team. The free tier has no engine restrictions.
Tools are totally free too. There are no special limiting features behind any paywalls, and free users have all the features as paid users.
There are no royalties associated with publishing your apps and games - you've made them, you own them.
It is free to publish to playcanvas.com as well, just by one click in Editor.
Pro Cross-platform support
PlayCanvas lets you build games that run in mobile, desktop browsers, and native mobile apps. PlayCanvas can even make games that can run inside mobile social media and instant messenger clients like Twitter and WhatsApp.
Pro Small app size
The engine itself weighs just under 150Kb, and it's always challenged to stay small. There is no extra weight that has to be carried with your app, just your assets and scripts in a runtime-friendly compressed form.
This allows users to engage with your content in matter of seconds, and even just under a second on a good connection.
Pro Open source
PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development.
Pro Very easy to use
Pro Loads extremely fast
Pro Has hot code reloading
Real-time link between your launched app and the editor allows the developer to preview and play with their scene without needing to refresh the game after every change in the code to see the updated result.
Pro Easy to use
The whole interface is intuitive and easy to learn: each part of the game can be designed using visual editors. The objects editor is used to create the objects of the game, the scene editor help you to build the levels of your game and the events editor allows to give life to the whole game without programming.
Pro Free and open-source
GDevelop's runtime libraries are MIT licensed. It can be used freely for projects of any type and there are no royalties associated with publishing games developed with GDevelop.
Pro Powerful events system to create games without programming
No need for coding using this system which is clear and powerful: events are composed of conditions and actions. Actions are launched when conditions are fulfilled.
This is a very friendly way of making games and is still efficient for advanced usage, contrary to most other "block"/"drag'n'drop" systems.
Pro Open source plugin SDK
The plugin SDK is open source, so if you want to extend it, you can.
Pro Lots of features to build games
The engine includes pathfinding, physics engine, multitouch support, custom hitboxes, platformer engine, tiled maps, multiple layers and cameras out of the box.
All of these features can be used without programming knowledge, using the visual editors.
Pro Quickly add behaviors to objects
Prebuilt behaviors can be added to objects. This is a very efficient way to add a physics engine or make a platformer game. Lots of behaviors are included, from the most advanced (Physics, platformer, top-down movement) to really simple one (like the behavior to destroy objects when outside the screen or the one to drag objects with mouse or touch).
And you still have full controls over your game as behaviors can be modified using the events!
Pro New documentation for gd5 is good for starting
A new doc is improving for gd5 that is nice for beginners and after that you can learn more from examples. Also, gd4 wiki is still there.
Pro Constant updates
New releases and bug fixes are consistent. New updates are released anywhere within 2 weeks or 1 month from the last one. Its auto-updater also does it job very well making life a lot easier.
Pro Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android
Thanks to its open source nature, GDevelop-App.com was built over the GDevelop engine.
GDevelop-App.com is a complete game creator similar to GDevelop, available directly in your browser and compatible with iPad and most Android tablets and phone! The app is perfect for making games directly from your sofa and you can even start a game on GDevelop-App and export it to open it inside GDevelop.
Pro Multilanguage support
GDevelop is available in many languages and even community can help in translations.
Cons
Con Private projects are only available for premium users
The free tier does not support any private projects. Instead, all the code and assets will be hosted openly. While not a problem for open source games and for developers who intend to make an open source game, it can be a deal-breaker for teams who want to keep their code and assets private.
Con No collision offset
Con Not many tutorials
Con No support for atlas/tilemap and sprite sheet
At this point, you need to separate the tileset maps or character animation sprite sheet before importing it to the engine, but the developers are working on this feature.
Con GUI is slow to load
This makes doing the simplest things, like looking at one of your maps, hard to do. In looking into this program, it can stall a PC while trying to load a sample map.
Con No 3d, not even fake 3d
This is a 100$ 2d-only game engine. You could of course use pre-rendered 3d graphics, but your games themselves will exist only in the x and y axes.
Con It's very slow
Although suggested otherwise, GDevelop doesn't compile the games - it just adds wrappers so each OS can run the HTML5 game it creates. That means it runs much, much slower than other engines that do compile games.
Con No cross-compiler
The Windows and Linux versions of GDevelop can each compile a native application; but the Windows version cannot compile for Linux, nor vice versa.
Con Optional subscription not mentioned on main site
While the engine is free and open source as stated on the main website, it does not mention that some optional features and services are actually activated through a paid subscription (two tiers: 2€ and 7€). Those features are: no nag screen shown when debugging, additional metrics available on games dashboard, access to more than 2 cloud exports per day (unlimited local export can be done without subscription, provided the right packaging tools are installed and configured), easy removal of GDevelop splash screen (can be done manually without subscription).
Con Behaviors of Objects are rather generalized
Since it has a fully GUI editor, the objects you are allowed to add in your game are pretty generalized (PhysicsObject, TiledSprite, PlatformerObject, etc). This limits the freedom of a game developer while making a game, as the object msut follow the preset behaviours imposed on it.