Developer Builds Same Game in Unity & Godot, Verdict Revealed

Unreal Engine, now unveiling its latest evolution, and Unity remain the dominant engines for game developers, yet alternatives such as Godot—an open‑source powerhouse—are gaining traction as a serious competitor to Unity. Which engine truly excels? A developer has taken it upon himself to find out.

Determining an unequivocal “best” engine is inherently subjective, hinging on a project’s ambition, genre, and the creator’s personal expertise. Nonetheless, Studio Interrupt’s designer Thomas Grové embarked on a small experiment to directly compare Godot and Unity.

Grové had planned to develop a survival‑horror indie title with his son, and saw this as the perfect occasion to pit the two engines head‑to‑head: same game, same team, and identical conditions, as he explains in his video. The findings could prove illuminating for other developers grappling with their engine choice.

In the video, he walks through the design and graphical requirements of the game and demonstrates how he built it in both technologies. The verdict is that both engines offer comparable feature sets, with occasional advantages for one or the other depending on the specific aspect examined. However, Godot appears to outperform Unity in key areas such as build times, startup speed, and asset loading.

Godot now outpaces Unity in almost every benchmark: it exports a game twenty times faster, loads a project five times quicker, and compiles code thirty‑one times more efficiently. And it does so while consuming a fraction of the memory—just 164 MB compared to Unity’s hefty 20 GB footprint.

In fact, Godot delivers superior performance across all measured categories except one, the final frames‑per‑second output where Unity traditionally shines—though the developer admits the data isn’t definitive.

Grové chose to stick with Godot because both engines comfortably exceeded his 60 fps target. Still, some players note that the test may not be conclusive, as the project was too simple to reveal each engine’s strengths in more complex titles.

Looking ahead, a new European engine, The Immense Engine, is set to enter the market and challenge the dominance of Unreal and Unity.