Gaea vs Gaffer
Gaea
quadspinner.com
Gaffer
gafferhq.orgSide by side
| Figure | Gaea | Gaffer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $99/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 1 |
| Spec score · Visual Effects Software | 8.1 (#10) | 7.7 (#19) |
| Support | Support, maintenance, and minor updates are included at no additional cost, and the company says it does not offer a guaranteed support SLA. | Users can ask questions and discuss feature requests on the gaffer-dev mailing list and GitHub Discussions; a community-run Discord is also listed. |
Plans
Gaea
- Indie$99 a month
- Professional$199 a month
- Enterprise$299 a month
- Community EditionFree
- Indie$99, paid once
- Professional$199, paid once
- Enterprise$299, paid once
In their own words
Gaea
Gaea is a Windows terrain design application for VFX, games, and virtual production. It builds terrain from procedural forms, imported data, or hand-drawn elements, then applies simulations for erosion, debris, glaciers, rivers, snow, and vegetation. It can produce terrain-aware color, textures, masks, material zones, vegetation data, and flow maps. Exports include heightfields, meshes, point clouds, textures, masks, and other terrain data. Bridges connect Gaea with Unreal Engine and Houdini; the Gaea2Houdini plugin requires a Professional or Enterprise license. Gaea also offers node-based compositing and a hybrid render engine.
The Community Edition is free for non-commercial use. The listed perpetual-license prices are $99 a month for Indie, $199 a month for Professional, and $299 a month for Enterprise; each is described as a one-time price. Gaea requires Windows, an AVX2-capable CPU, and at least 16 GB of RAM. CPU-only operation is supported; GPU compute needs CUDA 12.5 or higher or HIP 6.0 or higher.