Gaea vs WorldEngine
Gaea
quadspinner.comWorldEngine
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Gaea | WorldEngine |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 1 |
| Spec score · Game Map Generators | 8.3 (#4) | 7.6 (#14) |
| Purpose | Gaea is a terrain design platform for VFX, games, and virtual production. | WorldEngine generates worlds using plate simulation, rain shadows, erosion, and other processes. |
| Security | QuadSpinner says its Gaea binaries are signed with a code-signing certificate and provides an installer VirusTotal report. | GitHub reports that the project has no SECURITY.md policy and no published security advisories. |
| Support | Support, maintenance, and minor updates are included at no additional cost, and the company says it does not offer a guaranteed support SLA. | The README invites questions, suggestions, and contributions through its Google group or by opening an issue. |
Plans
Gaea
- Indie$99, paid once
- Professional$199, paid once
- Enterprise$299, paid once
- 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.
WorldEngine
WorldEngine is free, MIT-licensed software for procedural world generation. It models processes such as plate simulation, rain shadows, erosion, humidity, and terrain permeability to generate world data and images. Outputs include elevation, precipitation, temperature, biome, and ocean maps, as well as heightmaps and biome maps. Users can set a seed, and the command line can create an ancient-looking map from a world file. Worlds can be saved in protobuf or HDF5 formats; HDF5 support requires the optional h5py dependency. Python applications can load world files using WorldEngine as a library, while Java applications can use WorldEngine-Java. Installation instructions cover Docker, source, and uv, but the package is not currently released on PyPI. WorldEngine requires Python 3.9 or later and supports versions through 3.14. A separate graphical interface is available as an experimental, limited project. The project invites questions, suggestions, and contributions through its Google group or by opening an issue.