Unity License Comparison

Below are side-by-side comparisons of Unity licenses. The Unity licenses that you can buy straight from our store are Unity Pro, Unity iPhone Basic and Unity iPhone Advanced. To get licenses for educational institutions, or to develop Nintendo Wii retail or WiiWare games, or source code access, contact sales@unity3d.com. Oh, and don't forget that Unity is free and it comes with a full 30 day Unity Pro trial!

General	Unity iPhone Advanced	Unity iPhone Basic	Unity Wii
Integrated Editor Everything is done through Unity's simple user interface. Thousands of hours of thought and spit-polish have gone into it. Read more
Instantaneous, Automatic Asset Importing All major file formats are supported, and almost any art application can be used with Unity. Read more
Optimized Graphics Unity has a highly optimized graphics pipeline for both DirectX and OpenGL. Animated meshes, particle systems, advanced lighting and shadows — all will run blazing fast. Read more
Physics Bring your interactions to life with the built-in NVIDIA PhysX™ physics engine. Read more
Shaders (Built-in and Custom) Unity's shader system combines ease of use, flexibility and performance. Read more	¹	¹	¹
Audio (3D Positional and Classic Stereo) Place positional audio-sources anywhere. Tune distance attenuation, volume, pitch, and doppler effect parameters for the most immersive audio experience possible. Read more
One-Click Deployment Publish your game on your desired platform at the push of a single button. Read more
.NET Based Scripting With C#, JavaScript, and Boo Blazing fast .NET-based scripting, with rich libraries and great documentation. Scripting is flexible and easy, and compiled to native code to run nearly as fast as C++. Read more	²	²
Access to Web Data through WWW Functions For access to web-pages and the data they contain, Unity provides an easy to use WWW interface. Both synchronous and asynchronous modes are supported. See WWW interface docs
.NET Socket Support Use .NET sockets to connect with virtually any back-end technology you want to create network-aware content that offers a dynamic and ever-changing game play experience. .NET socket libraries can be used for real-time networking, by opening TCP/IP sockets or sending UDP messages. They also make speaking XML easy, and can connect to ODBC database connections.
Open an URL in the User's Browser Use Application.OpenURL to open any URL in the browser (on iPhone the URL is opened in Safari).
Web Browser Integration When running in a web browser, the deployed Web Player can communicate seamlessly with the container web page. That way you get javascript communication and full AJAX capabilities. See browser communication docs
Multiplayer Networking with RakNet Unity makes the deep complexities of realtime networking easy to create. Turning a single-player game into a networked multi-player game requires few changes to your existing scripts. Unity does the hard lifting so you never have to think about NAT punchthrough or any other networking technicalities. See multiplayer networking docs
Terrains (Vast, Densely Foliaged Landscapes) Vast, densely foliaged landscapes that run smoothly on low-end hardware. All that and they take up almost no disk space. Read more
Integrated Animation Editor Create and edit animation clips directly inside Unity. Animate values of any component, material, or script and insert animation events to call script functions at specific times. Read more
Textures and Audio Streaming Stream in any texture or audio asset while your game is running.			³
Render-to-Texture Effects Create water with realtime reflections & refractions, surveilance cameras, or use it to create your own full screen post-processing effects.
Full-Screen Post-Processing Effects Use our built-in image post-processing effects like Glow, Motion Blur, Color Correction, and others, or create your own custom ones. See image effect docs
Realtime Shadows Unity Pro supports realtime shadows with self-shadowing that just work. Read more Without Unity Pro it is of course still possible to use lower-end shadowing techniques, like Lightmaps or Projectors.
Profiler The Profiler in Unity Pro helps you to optimize your game. It reports how much time is spent on rendering, animation, physics, your game logic etc. Read more
Low-Level Rendering Access Need to use custom rendering techniques, bypassing Unity's rendering pipeline? The Graphics and GL classes give you access to the bare metal.
External Version Control Support Unity Pro now supports an alternative way of saving metadata for better external version control. When enabled, version control systems such as Subversion, Perforce, or Bazaar can be used without losing import settings or references between assets.
C/C++/Objective-C Plugins Support Have a custom native library that you absolutely must use? Use a C, C++ or Objective-C plugin to directly call into it. See plugin docs
Video Playback and Streaming Import and play back videos. Stream them from the net. Put them onto any 3D surface, or display them in 2D on top of your game. Read more	^{4, 5}		³
Fully Fledged Streaming with Asset Bundles Stream in anything to the web player or application using Unity's Streaming Asset Bundle features. Textures, animated models, complete or partial scenes, new missions and expansions, user-generated characters.			³
Script Access to Asset Pipeline Get direct access to Unity's asset pipeline from scripts. Need a build machine that churns out builds 24/7? It's just a few lines of code.
No Unity Splash Screen or Watermark Standalone games and iPhone games will not display the "Made with Unity" splash screen. Web player games will not display the 5 second Unity watermark.
May be licensed and used by companies or incorporated entities that had a turnover in excess of US$100,000 in their last fiscal year More information in End User License Agreement
Unity iPhone Specific Features	Unity iPhone Advanced	Unity iPhone Basic
Multi-Touch Support A simple scripting class provides a way to track up to five touches simultaneously. Classical Unity mouse input API is supported too - iPhone or iPod Touch screen is treated like a mouse touchpad with respect to device orientation.
Accelerometer Support You need just one line of code to access the accelerometer's data on the iPhone.
iPhone-enabled Live Preview With the iPhone Remote, you can use an actual iPhone or iPod Touch to view and test your game live, right inside the Unity Editor. Just hit Play then test with iPhone in hand.
Occlusion Culling PVS-based occlusion culling enabled on the iPhone is perfect for squeezing maximum performance out your game.
Dynamic Geometry Batching Small movable meshes are joined into one mesh for rendering. This is really effective when you have a bunch of smaller moving objects. With no action needed on your part, small meshes that share materials will only consume one draw call.
Static Geometry Batching Unity will automatically join static mesh objects with shared materials. This is done at build time, so you can place a bunch of detail objects in the editor and only pay one draw call. Objects are still culled individually, in order to yield the highest possible performance.
Improved Build Size Stripping Selectively include or exclude certain components of the Unity engine to optimize both your content build size and memory footprint at run-time. Not using physics? Then exclude that part of our engine at build-time to reduce your content's file size as well as avoid unnecessary overhead while your content is being played.
Unity Wii Specific Features			Unity Wii
Geometry Quantization to Smaller Data Formats When building for the Wii, most of vertex components are quantized to 16-bit to shrink down the size of the published data.
Wii Remote, Nunchuk, and Classic Controller Support A simple, straightforward, fully-featured remote scripting class lets you read data from the Wii Remote, Nunchuk, and Classic Controller effortlessly.
Access to Internal NAND Memory Coroutine based interface is provided to easily access internal storage memory.
Home Menu Integration Home Button Menu is fully integrated. Show and process it with a single function call.
Automatic Disk Error Handling Whenever the disk is removed or couldn't be read and the device issues an error, Unity handles display of the correct message automatically. Multiple languages are supported.

¹ Only fixed function shaders are supported on iPhone & Wii hardware.
² Unity iPhone supports .NET 1.1 while .NET 2.0 and generics are not supported. Scripting with Boo is not supported on Unity iPhone.
³ Streaming from the net is not supported on Wii. Streaming from disk is supported on disk titles. No streaming is supported on WiiWare titles.
⁴ Streaming from the net is not supported on the iPhone and iPod touch.
⁵ Video playback can only occur fullscreen on the iPhone and iPod touch, playback as a texture on a surface is not supported.

License Restrictions

All of this is covered in End User License Agreement, but the restrictions in place for Unity are:

Companies or incorporated entities that had a turnover in excess of US$100,000 in their last fiscal year must use Unity Pro.
A company, incorporated entity, or individual may not use both Unity and Unity Pro. So a team can't mix those two licenses.

Restrictions on Unity iPhone Publishing Basic

The Basic license can be purchased and used with either Unity or Unity Pro. The restrictions for the Basic license are:

Unity iPhone Publishing Basic may not be licensed and used by companies or incorporated entities that had a turnover in excess of US$100,000 in their last fiscal year.
A company, incorporated entity, or individual may not license both Unity iPhone Publishing Basic and Unity iPhone Publishing Advanced at the same time. So a team can't mix those two licenses.

Questions?

If you have any questions about licensing Unity or the differences between the licenses we offer then please contact sales@unity3d.com as we would be happy to assist you!