Top Rated Corona SDK Alternatives
Beauty of corona is its simple API, although i was new to lua i was able to pick it up in couple of hours. The api itself was so simple that i was able to make prototypes really fast. The tool itself was built with developers in mind, it is code first meaning "no daunting configurations or clunky IDEs that you have to get acquainted with.". All you need to get started with corona sdk is a text editor.
It is truely cross platform with single code base. You dont have to have any experience in Android studio or Xcode to port it to IOS or Android, all the heavy lifting is done by the tool.
Advantages of corona:
Simple api
Lua is easy to learn
Games run without any lag on all platforms
Very active community
Very good and clear documentation
Tool itself is very simple and all the heavy lifting is already done by corona folks.
Almost forgot to add this, its free you can actually make a full fledged game and publish it to all platforms without paying a penny. Unlike unity where they will put a splash screen saying 'made with unity' for free version.
App size will be very small Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Disadvantages:
It is 2D engine and you can also make 2.5D, so incase if you want to make a 3D game you have to move to a new platform (unity, unreal etc)
No graphical editor(i personally dont like graphical editors), there was somework done on this and a beta graphical editor was released but had lot of glitches.
Not many 3rd party tools
No asset store (like unity asset store) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
11 out of 12 Total Reviews for Corona SDK
With Corona you dont need to beign from scratch, it provides a range of resources to assist you in building your app, such as customized code and graphics. This implies that you can develop your app swiftly and with reduced exertion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Corona is great for creating apps. It may not be the best choice if you are looking to develop highly intricate and advanced applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Corona SDK is most popular for developing apps and games.It is open source as well as cross platform which helps developers to save their time and money. The best part is that it provides real-time testing which reflects our changes immediately in results. It has 1000+ APIs and plugins which made it high performing development tool. It supports Lua scripting language which is light-weight is easy to go. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It is overall a great SDK but there are 2 downsides of it. First, it is not efficient for offline builds, for this we need premium version of it which can cost us a lot. Second, we must submit the code to the Corona server for compilation while building a project. We are unable to compile the code locally. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Corona SDK has become my primary tool for doing cross-platform app development. Supported platforms include iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, and OUYA with more in development.
Development time is significantly shorter. It is a stable platform (I have been using it for over 5 years).
I have been using Corona to teach mobile app development at the university level with great success and publish my own apps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While Corona does have some limitations since it is not a native app. I have found that it can handle the majority of my app development needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Corona SDK provides a simple but very powerful Lua based development system. Paired with your editor of choice Corona forms a complete environment to allow anyone to create their own apps that will run on Apple iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad), Google Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows Phone devices.
The latest version now includes support for desktop (OSX and Windows) devices as well as Apple TV.
Corona is perfect for creating any kind of 2D games as well as business & educational apps using the included massive library of components and functions.
The community support provided on the developer forum is second to none with lot's of help and advice from both users and the Corona Labs dev team.
The recent acquisition of Corona by Perk means that the future of the SDK is in safe hands and Perk's Ad system coupled with the various store IAP modules means that it's easy for developers to make apps that can actually earn a decent income on the app store.
There are also lot's of free online tutorials and articles that help developers get up to speed quickly and easily as well as a number of very reasonably priced online courses at sides like Udemy.com. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There's nothing to dislike about the environment if your interested in creating mobile (and now desktop) apps Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Corona SDK provides an easy to access framework for developing cross-platform mobile and now desktop apps. The fundamental tenants of the Lua language are easy to grasp and the SDK provides an extensive framework of support for commonly needed functions including powerful physics, image manipulation, audio and text handling. There is a strong supportive community of users ready to lend a hand and very responsive engineers who frequent the Corona Forums to help answer questions. Corona SDK is in constant Agile development with nearly daily builds available to those developers who want the latest in functionality. The Corona team is on top of the complex web of changing technical advances on mobile OSen and this shows in regular advances for support of the latest release of Android OS and iOS as well as newer deployment platforms such as Apple TV. Apps built with Corona can be deployed not only to the App Store and Google Play Store but also Amazon and NOOK. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Debugging in Corona is difficult as there is no integrated debugger and the only official debugging support is via a plug-in for a somewhat defunct text editor (Sublime.) What would be very simple to do in an IDE such as Eclipse becomes painful in Corona SDK. Not having a table inspector also makes it a challenge as the fundamental tenant of the host language - Lua - is the use of tables. Also very problematic is using Corona SDK to handle video as a content type - you cannot see videos when testing in the Corona Simulator and functional support for video content is quite limited. I find the Corona Composer - a visual timeline editor component - to be of limited value and somewhat buggy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Less coding.
- It's Physics engine is very good.
- Build for a lot of platforms like Android, IOS and Windows phone 8.
- Recommended for 2D Games and eBooks Apps.
- New monetization model is very good like ads and IAP. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Business apps is very poor, it doesn't have a lot of UI widgets.
- Poor UI customization for the current UI widgets.
- Sometimes it's hard to debug errors.
- Poor device testing methodology - Like maps, I have to test it on a real device because it doesn't work on Corona Simulator.
- Poor Simulator. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The first thing I liked in Corona, is easy-testing feature. Before that I would have to compile the project and test on the mobile phone/phones/tablets. In corona I was able to test the program on different platform right away. Second, and it is also kinda related to the first, that by simple editing of the configure file you can make your program cross-platform. And the third, but I guess it was the most important for me during that period - is a great community. You basically can search for almost any question and get already an answer. And if you don't find it right away you can ask and get an answer pretty quick. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I am not sure about current releases, but when I was doing game with Corona (2 years ago) there were no comparability with Linux. Also that time it was imposible to convert your code to HTML5 project for browser apps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Lua is easy to learn and use. Although it starts the loop with 0
- Compiles super fast, almost instant reload. Very valuable feature while doing rapid development.
- Easy to handle graphic and image related stuff since the nature of the SDK
- Compared with all the other competitors, at least within similar interested industries, Corona probably has the best community. And since it started so long ago, tutorials, Stackoverflow questions are all over there. Easy to handle most of the issue you encounter Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Any thing related to OS, it sucks. well not that much. it has improved a lot but still
- The above reason makes it only suits a very use cases like games
- Using lua will make you dumb, sort of. I mean you do need to learn swift Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
At the time, Corona SDK was a very innovative way to get simple 2D games to mobile platforms without the burden of major league native language development. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The LUA programming language is very limited and lacks features that advanced programmers would want to create a game that had an ambitious scope, therefore, the platform is best suited to simple games.
Additionally, Corona's toolset was very minimal, with many quality of life features from other game engines completely missing, such as visual tools for creating collision boxes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We use Corona SDK to create several story books for both iOS and Android market. The best feature is that you just need to have one codebase to create an app. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What I dislike from Corona SDK is how the implement the sound system. Their sound technology need to be upgraded because we have a hard time make it right. Most of the time, the sound is lagging behind several milliseconds making it look weird. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
