Here’s the Deal

MagicaVoxel vs Goxel

203 32

39 6

When comparing MagicaVoxel vs Goxel, the Slant community recommends MagicaVoxel for most people. In the question“What are the best voxel editors?” MagicaVoxel is ranked 1st while Goxel is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose MagicaVoxel is:

Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best voxel editors?

MagicaVoxel

Goxel

Pros

Pro
Has isometric view mode

Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.

Pro
Free

No cost, subscription, or license, even for commercial use.

Pro
Excellent rendering mode

Raytracing, GI, AO, and configurable PBR, all GPU accelerated.

Pro
Very easy to use

MagicaVoxel has sane defaults and an intuitive interface. You add or remove voxels with the left-click and rotate the camera with the right-click. The interface does not overwhelm or get in the way, yet it keeps all functionality within easy reach.

Very helpful for beginners is the fact that hovering with the mouse over a tool shows hints on how to use the tool. The hints can be found at the bottom of the interface.

Pro
Realtime render

The viewport renders the objects in real time. Changes made to lighting and materials (such as reflectivity, opacity, etc) are instantly shown on the screen with minimal to no delay. The renderer also allows adjusting things like FOV.

Pro
Actively developed

MagicaVoxel is constantly being developed with new releases bringing bug fixes and new features being released on a constant basis.

Pro
Great workflow

Bake possibility, easy to create a custom palette. Not even in version 1.0 and it's already great.

Pro
Keyboard shortcut cheat sheet is available

A list of all keyboard shortcuts organized by category is available on the website.

Pro
Imports and exports as .obj

Pro
Large build size

Now supports up to 2048^3 voxels.

Pro
Object Trees

Now has a “world” and “object” mode, objects can be grouped together and organized, multiple layers to organize, hide, and reveal, and objects can be copied as a “reference” so any changes to one will affect the others.

Pro
Shader language to generate voxels

Pro
Open source

Pro
GNU/Linux

At least somewhat available for GNU/Linux.

Pro
Supports .obj

Pro
Available on Android

Pro
Simple Interface

Pro
Supports procedural rendering

You can script a build for it to render.

Pro
Exports to PLY format

Pro
Available in Debian/Ubuntu repository

If you don't have it installed yet, just enter "sudo apt install goxel && goxel" on the terminal, and you will be running it in a few seconds.

Pro
Available on iOS

Works nicely with Apple Pencil.

Ad
Cons

Con
No native Linux

It works in Linux, but Wine should be used.

Con
Small sizes

The maximum dimensions for one voxel is 126 x 126 x 126 (since May 2020 it is 256 x 256 x 256). To put this into perspective, the kvx format (an older format by ken silverman used in games like blood, shadow warrior, and ZDooM-based ports) has maximum dimensions of 256x256x255. while newer versions of magicavoxel include a world editor (in which multiple voxels can be arranged into a set), each voxel is exported separately.

Con
No support/help

There is no clear way to get help, though you might be able to reach out to the dev via Twitter, also github should be easy to manage.

Con
No command line options

Without command line options, it's not possible to automate rendering at all. If you have hundreds of models (to make an animation for example), you have to render all of them manually. Plus, you cannot even open .vox file by doubleclicking it!

Con
Bad model mesh exporting

For video game development, it's needed to rearrange some of the vertices, builds triangles per color, instead of one big mesh. It's tedious to solve but gives overall nice results.