What Godot Does Better Than Unity

Both Godot and Unity are well-known game engines used by developers for both 2D and 3D games. Most comparisons come down to the claim that choosing between Unity and Godot depends heavily on the use case. I agree with that. But in my opinion there are points where Godot is clearly ahead and inevitably lures developers away from Unity. I want to focus on those points in this post.

Open

One of Godot's biggest advantages is that the game engine is open source. That means the engine's source code is publicly and freely accessible to everyone. You can modify and redistribute it without paying any fees. As a result, a large community of developers has formed that actively works on and continues to improve the engine. Those who don't want to actively work on the engine can still voice feedback, suggestions, and wishes, helping ensure the engine caters to the needs of the people who actually use it, rather than to shareholders or stakeholders of a company.

Beyond that, being open source means no license fees are due when you sell a game developed with Godot. For independent developers and small studios with a limited budget, this makes it possible to put resources into other areas of their projects instead.

Accessibility

Another advantage of Godot is how flexibly the engine can be used. The engine is designed for ease of use, especially for people just getting started in game development. The user interface is clean, the built-in scripting language is easy to learn, and the node system makes it possible to represent code structure visually in a hierarchy, which builds understanding of essential concepts like inheritance, modularity, and dependency.

While there aren't currently as many tutorials and guides for Godot as there are for Unity, that's really just a matter of time. In the meantime, beginners are very well supported by the community Discords.

Flexibility

Godot supports its own scripting language, GDScript, but also development in C# and C++. This lets developers decide for themselves at what point in their career they want to dive a level deeper into the engine — whether to understand it better or to extend it with their own custom functionality.

This point also relates to the fact that Godot isn't only suited to games, but also to "regular" desktop applications. This becomes clearer with the fact that Godot's editor (essentially its GUI) was itself built with Godot. In the truest sense of the word, it's an interface with no inherent business logic — it only handles the necessary function calls and rendering of the engine. Can you build games as a web app with Godot? The Godot editor itself is available as a web app or as a mobile app in the Google Play Store.

New

It might sound like a slogan, but when comparing Godot to Unity, or Godot to any other established engine, this point has to be taken into account too.

With Godot, especially as an open-source project, the opportunity arose to start fresh. To rethink game engines. Many design decisions made by established engines only revealed themselves as mistakes years later, once it was already too late. In Godot, developers can take those lessons and let them inform the engine's design.

Unlike Unity, Godot has only a single UI system, one working input system (which, incidentally, is far more customizable and reliable than either of Unity's two systems), and no feature modules that have been "in preview" for several years only to eventually be forgotten.

In many ways, Godot is a breath of fresh air — one that naturally also brings things that aren't necessarily better, but that at least actively question whether the way games are developed in Unity and similar engines even makes sense in the first place.