Google ARCore vs. Vuforia Engine

It is well suited for small objects in home/office or familiar surroundings to anchor Augmented Reality Objects. It works well for most e-commerce use cases, travel use cases, games, etc. It is not well suited where depth occlusion is the primary use case or human body anchoring is required or even for large-scale AR use cases.

Incentivized

Definetely when needing an image target based AR experience, I'd go with Vuforia Engine, the implementation is pretty straightforward (at least when using UNITY SDK), it is well documented and there are plenty of examples to start with. I wouldn't recommend it yet for tracking objects or environments if it is for commercial purposes, because it tends to fail from time to time from my experience.

Incentivized

• It understands the surroundings very well as it maps it around the user.
• It understands the users' relative position in terms of the surroundings and tracks the users' movements.
• It can sense the surrounding lighting and overlay that on top of the AR objects to make it more immersive.

Incentivized

• Depth sensing can be improved
• Human body detection is not great
• For large scale virtual objects, it slows down

Incentivized

• Performance when using unity (the device heats up).
• Image marker works fine but surface detection tends to fail still.
• Even though there's a free plan, there are many alternatives now where they cost less or they're even free.

Incentivized

Vuforia Engine has limited functionalities compared to ARCore. It has image-based detection and augmentation which requires users to have the anchor image with them for the augmentation to properly occur. ARCore solves that and it's one step less to reach the user and really convince them to try it.

Incentivized

• It helps to make your 3D app more realistic
• It's better than other tools for rendering on app smoothness