Epic Online Services vs LEADR

Epic Online Services is a suite of modular online services for game developers. Its service areas cover accounts and social features, multiplayer, player and game data, and trust and safety. Social capabilities include crossplay, friends, presence, overlay, and the Epic Games account ecosystem. Multiplayer tools include peer-to-peer features, sessions, lobbies, and voice chat. Developers can use leaderboards, stats, achievements, and storage for player and title data. Trust and safety services include Easy Anti-Cheat, sanctions, player reports, and Kids Web Services. The services can be used with Unreal Engine, Unity, or a developer's chosen engine. SDKs are available for PC in C or C#, Android, and iOS; console SDKs require a request through the Developer Portal. Epic describes the service as free to use, with no royalty or hosting fees, though usage restrictions may apply. Epic says it processes game-service data to operate the services and does not share partner data without explicit authorization. Use may be throttled or suspended for violations of service restrictions.

LEADR provides leaderboard backend services and social engagement features for games. Developers can configure score units, sorting, per-player score handling, tags, icons, and shareable board codes. SDKs are documented for Godot, Unity, and Unreal, with support stated for additional game engines. Hosted boards get shareable web pages for embedding, and can run recurring seasons or timed events, reset automatically, and archive completed results. Described anti-cheat measures include client authentication and anomaly detection for suspicious submissions. LEADR offers cloud hosting and an Apache 2.0-licensed core that can be self-hosted using Docker Compose. The company says cloud data is stored in the EU, on servers in Germany, with automatic backups. Its privacy policy describes player data as pseudonymous and scoped to a game, without cross-game tracking. The Free plan is free and allows 10,000 score submissions per month; Indie is $7.99 a month and Studio is $129.99 a month.