When comparing GDevelop vs Unreal Engine 4, the Slant community recommends GDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” GDevelop is ranked 2nd while Unreal Engine 4 is ranked 17th. 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 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.
Pro A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping
Blueprints are authoring tools designed for non programmers so designers and other team members can help tweak and prototype. UE4's Blueprint scripts resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish and games a lot faster to prototype.
Pro Lots of resources to learn from
Epic provides multiple official video tutorials, lots of free example projects and content, an extensive wiki and regular streams showing how to use latest features.
Pro Powerful material/shader system
Allows a texture/material artist or VFX artist to create amazing effects from the ground up.

Pro Free development license, including source code
The engine, including full access to source code, is free to use; a 5% royalty is due only when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
Pro Realistic graphics
Pro Developers have full control of the engine and source code
UE4 gives full access to the C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system.
Pro Dynamic global illumination with voxel cone tracing decreases the computational power needed
Voxel cone tracing is a similar algorithm to ray tracing, but uses thick rays instead of pixel thin rays to be able vastly decrease the amount of computational power needed.
Pro Easy to use animation blueprints
Unreal Engine 4 is one of the best game engines. It is super easy. It dosent require any use of coding due to Animation Blueprints
Pro Spectacular lighting visuals
Pro Cross-platform editor and export
This engine exports for a big range of platforms including Linux. The editor can be run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Early Access).
Pro Active community
Forums have many active and friendly members that are quick to respond and help out. Even staff is very active on forums.
Pro AAA Ready
This is ready to make the next AAA game.
Pro Fast compilation for quick iteration
Recompiling an entire game to test a small change takes up a lot of time. UE4 quickly compiles in seconds instead of minutes improving iteration time by an order of magnitude.
Pro Quick release-cycle
New feature releases can be commonly expected about once a month.
Pro Professional feature set for all aspects of game development
Almost everything a game developer wants has a deep and sophisticated tool waiting for them in UE4. No external plugins are needed to make powerful materials, FX, terrain, cinematics, gameplay logic, AI, animation graphs, post process effects, lighting etc.
Pro Proven track record
Pro No coding experience needed
Cons
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.
Con Very high build size
A blank project will build in to a minimum of 200 MB.
Con Slow
Compared to other engines, UE4 seems to perform various actions considerably slower. Actions like starting the engine, opening the editor, opening a project, rebuilding shaders, updating references, calculating lightmaps, saving projects, etc take long enough to get irritating and end up wasting precious development time.
Con Extremely long build times
Making a full rebuild, including engine can take a good 30minutes. If you plan to use Unreal professionally, you better get some licenses for Incredibuild as well.
Con Hard engine for beginners
This engine not easy for beginners
Con Steep learning curve
Especially when compared to its primary competitor, Unity.
Con No drawcall batching, performance is very bad on mobile
There's no dynamic batching support to minimize drawcalls. There's InstancedStaticmesh concept in UE4, but it's 3d only, functionally limited and requires hardware support which rules out most mobile devices.
Con C++ - oriented development cycle: slow turn-around times
The Unreal Editor is the main place to do stuff (of course), so if someone wants to do a lot of C++ stuff, the compilation and linking turn-around times can be painful. Still they probably are quite fast in comparison to the provided featureset.. Still ,they are far from optimal.
Con Poor documentation
Most of the "documentation" for code is actually just automatically generated from the source. If you're interested in knowing how things are supposed to work, you must either go to their answers site or pay for UDN.
Often their examples won't even compile, since they were written for now outdated versions.
Con Royalty based
5% of profits will go to Unreal after $3000 earned in a quarter.
Con They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones
Con C# not natively supported
UE4 does not support C# natively, but this can be achieved through MonoUE, although it requires using the MonoUE fork instead of UE itself.
Con Poor source control support
Merge tool is not working.
Con Poor quality assurance on their releases
After each release they almost immediately release a hotfix. And another one. And another one.
Con Unreal Engine crashes a lot if you don't have the required system requirements
Con Sparse Resources for C++
C++ happens to be the main suite for Unreal, yet the documentation is very, very sparse.
Con Extremely poorly designed
The code is a mess.
Everything is connected, a single Actor is 1500 bytes, because it contains a million things that Epic once needed in a game.
Inheritance for AActor: AActor > UObject > UObjectBaseUtility > UObjectBase
Con Difficult for Mac users
If you're installing it on Mac, you simply download Epic games launcher and watch it download nothing endlessly.
Con Tutorials do not go in-depth enough
The blueprint tutorial just teaches how to turn on a light when you press f.
Con Proprietary
Con Not available on Linux
Con No Terrain Editor included
Con Bad support
The epic games team only assists with billing and account issues, not bugs.
Con Terrible physics

Con Frequent crashes
Often the editor crashes interrupting your work.
Con Poor error messages
Con Rarely works
