Resolved Difference between FlowReactor and uNode?

New potential game dev here. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this (and maybe the wrong Prefix for the title, why no "Question" prefix?), but does anyone know/can explain the difference(s) between FlowReactor and uNode?

They seem awfully similar in my uneducated eyes. Are there differences in performance? Features? Quality of Life Stuff? Hopefully someone can provide answers before they aren't both on sale. I know I need one of them, I should really only buy 1 of them, but I just don't know/can't tell which is better. Anybody know?

 

FlowReactor only has high-level custom coded nodes which means its application is very limited unless you code additional custom nodes in C# yourself or pay someone else to do it. Sorta like Playmaker's custom actions, but Playmaker has been around for years so it has the advantage of a large community and a large backlog of custom actions which FlowReactor does not possess. FlowReactor is not a full-blown C# replacement.

FlowReactor also has received no updates for more than half a year and Discord seems pretty dead so it doesn't seem like the tool to adapt long term. It also has technical issues like its inability to reference Self (this) in the graph without C# helper methods. Something that all other Unity VS tools can do easily.

Performance wise FlowReactor is faster than Bolt/UnityVS but slower than any other VS tool on the market.

uNode, meanwhile, has auto generated API nodes (for every public Unity property and method there's a node) and it outputs native C# scripts for builds so performance wise it has the potential to be as fast as C# code. But in reality that's not always the case since the code it auto generates can be unoptimized. uNode like FlowReactor hasn't really been proven in production and it has consistent stability issues.

If you're looking for stable, proven in production visual scripting tools, consider looking into Flow Canvas + Node Canvas combo. They're supported, used in well-known games such as The Long Dark and have good performance. Unity Visual Scripting is the next best thing after Flow/Node Canvas since it has Unity resources behind it.

 

I guess I'll hold off on buying either of them then. Further reading in a different thread saw a Unity Dev themself say that Unity Visual Scripting will be receiving some nice performance improvements...I forget when they said (It's past my bedtime atm and I was about to shutdown for the night so I can't look atm.). So I guess I should wait to see how that turns out. Thanks!