Preface: not the developer of FlowCanvas or Bolt or any asset store product really.
They’re kinda similar, kinda not.
At a high level:
Bolt supports both state machines and flow graphs in a single tool. This means you can define state machine conditions as flow graphs. That’s convenient.
FlowCanvas is just a flow graph; NodeCanvas is its FSM-based counterpart (that also supports behavior trees). They’re two separate products, and there’s a “bridge” asset you can download if you need FlowCanvas to talk to NodeCanvas, or vice versa. It’s not as convenient as Bolt’s all-in-one approach to be honest, but NodeCanvas’ behavior trees implementation is pretty valuable so I understand why they’re separate products.
At a low level (performance):
“It depends.”
Right now I’d say performance is pretty similar. Bolt 2, the next major version of Bolt, will reportedly compile down to C# code, so it may be measurably faster than FlowCanvas’ reflection technique, but whether that has a material impact on your game depends on a variety of factors.
I own both assets. Currently I’m leveraging NodeCanvas+FlowCanvas. Things could be better, but I could also be a unicorn, so I’m going with what works for me, for now.
guyboots_thunderbro
