# Corona SDK Reviews **Vendor:** Corona Labs **Category:** [Mobile Development Platforms](https://www.g2.com/categories/mobile-development-platforms) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 12 ## About Corona SDK Creators of Corona SDK. Cross-platform development of 2D apps and games on iOS, Android, OS X, Windows and Windows Phone 8. ## Corona SDK Reviews ### 1. Corona SDK: A quick way to make apps for different devices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tejas M. | Android Developer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2023 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** With Corona you dont need to beign from scratch, it provides a range of resources to assist you in building your app, such as customized code and graphics. This implies that you can develop your app swiftly and with reduced exertion. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** Corona is great for creating apps. It may not be the best choice if you are looking to develop highly intricate and advanced applications. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** With corona we can test our app throughout the development process. This allows us to address any issues beforehand ensuring an experience for others when you eventually share it. In a nutshell, Corona is a fantastic tool if you wwant to create apps and games quickly and have them work on lots of different devices. Its like a shortcut to app making success. ### 2. Best Development Framework for Apps and Games **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jay P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** Corona SDK is most popular for developing apps and games.It is open source as well as cross platform which helps developers to save their time and money. The best part is that it provides real-time testing which reflects our changes immediately in results. It has 1000+ APIs and plugins which made it high performing development tool. It supports Lua scripting language which is light-weight is easy to go. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** It is overall a great SDK but there are 2 downsides of it. First, it is not efficient for offline builds, for this we need premium version of it which can cost us a lot. Second, we must submit the code to the Corona server for compilation while building a project. We are unable to compile the code locally. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** With the Corona SDK, one can become designer along with developer. Being a android developer, it has help me to develop and design app with the smooth flow and the availability of various feature make it more fruitful multimedia development tool. Also it has best documentation with all the tutorials and videos available for a beginner. ### 3. Have been using it for a Year and made a cross platform game with Corona SDK **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nischal Srinivas R. | senior software engineer I, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** Beauty of corona is its simple API, although i was new to lua i was able to pick it up in couple of hours. The api itself was so simple that i was able to make prototypes really fast. The tool itself was built with developers in mind, it is code first meaning "no daunting configurations or clunky IDEs that you have to get acquainted with.". All you need to get started with corona sdk is a text editor. It is truely cross platform with single code base. You dont have to have any experience in Android studio or Xcode to port it to IOS or Android, all the heavy lifting is done by the tool. Advantages of corona: Simple api Lua is easy to learn Games run without any lag on all platforms Very active community Very good and clear documentation Tool itself is very simple and all the heavy lifting is already done by corona folks. Almost forgot to add this, its free you can actually make a full fledged game and publish it to all platforms without paying a penny. Unlike unity where they will put a splash screen saying 'made with unity' for free version. App size will be very small **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** Disadvantages: It is 2D engine and you can also make 2.5D, so incase if you want to make a 3D game you have to move to a new platform (unity, unreal etc) No graphical editor(i personally dont like graphical editors), there was somework done on this and a beta graphical editor was released but had lot of glitches. Not many 3rd party tools No asset store (like unity asset store) **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** If all you want to do is a cross-platform 2D game you should do fine with corona SDK. It supports almost all mobile platforms with support for windows and mac (native pc support) in beta. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I make 2D mobile game with Corona SDK, so far it has been a very useful tool, given how fast i can prototype to get a prototype running. ### 4. Great tool for cross-platform app development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian B. | CEO, Higher Education, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** Corona SDK has become my primary tool for doing cross-platform app development. Supported platforms include iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, and OUYA with more in development. Development time is significantly shorter. It is a stable platform (I have been using it for over 5 years). I have been using Corona to teach mobile app development at the university level with great success and publish my own apps. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** While Corona does have some limitations since it is not a native app. I have found that it can handle the majority of my app development needs. **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** Corona is free for the standard version. There is an enterprise version that is available that allows the inclusion of native plugins. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** The primary benefit is speed of development. Projects that were taking months to complete are now finished in a fraction of the time AND published to multiple platforms. I have developed games, database apps, and REST based client/server apps. ### 5. Perfect introduction to cross platform mobile development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jon H. | Senior Front End Developer, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** Corona SDK provides a simple but very powerful Lua based development system. Paired with your editor of choice Corona forms a complete environment to allow anyone to create their own apps that will run on Apple iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad), Google Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows Phone devices. The latest version now includes support for desktop (OSX and Windows) devices as well as Apple TV. Corona is perfect for creating any kind of 2D games as well as business & educational apps using the included massive library of components and functions. The community support provided on the developer forum is second to none with lot's of help and advice from both users and the Corona Labs dev team. The recent acquisition of Corona by Perk means that the future of the SDK is in safe hands and Perk's Ad system coupled with the various store IAP modules means that it's easy for developers to make apps that can actually earn a decent income on the app store. There are also lot's of free online tutorials and articles that help developers get up to speed quickly and easily as well as a number of very reasonably priced online courses at sides like Udemy.com. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** There's nothing to dislike about the environment if your interested in creating mobile (and now desktop) apps **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** It's free to download, trial, build and submit apps. There really is nothing to loose. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I wanted to create my own mobile apps, using my development skills I have been able to release my own apps to the various app stores as well as being able to provide consultancy skills as a secondary source of income. ### 6. Corona SDK - An everyman's tool for app development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Terry R. S. | CTO, Board Member, Entertainment, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** Corona SDK provides an easy to access framework for developing cross-platform mobile and now desktop apps. The fundamental tenants of the Lua language are easy to grasp and the SDK provides an extensive framework of support for commonly needed functions including powerful physics, image manipulation, audio and text handling. There is a strong supportive community of users ready to lend a hand and very responsive engineers who frequent the Corona Forums to help answer questions. Corona SDK is in constant Agile development with nearly daily builds available to those developers who want the latest in functionality. The Corona team is on top of the complex web of changing technical advances on mobile OSen and this shows in regular advances for support of the latest release of Android OS and iOS as well as newer deployment platforms such as Apple TV. Apps built with Corona can be deployed not only to the App Store and Google Play Store but also Amazon and NOOK. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** Debugging in Corona is difficult as there is no integrated debugger and the only official debugging support is via a plug-in for a somewhat defunct text editor (Sublime.) What would be very simple to do in an IDE such as Eclipse becomes painful in Corona SDK. Not having a table inspector also makes it a challenge as the fundamental tenant of the host language - Lua - is the use of tables. Also very problematic is using Corona SDK to handle video as a content type - you cannot see videos when testing in the Corona Simulator and functional support for video content is quite limited. I find the Corona Composer - a visual timeline editor component - to be of limited value and somewhat buggy. **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** Read the regularly maintained documentation carefully. Be careful about reading blog posts to learn about Corona features because they change frequently enough that a blog post more than 6 months old is probably out of date or just wrong. Use the Daily Builds (or at least regularly read the build release notes) because the SDK is regularly advanced in a way that will be useful to most developers and generally, these builds are quite stable. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our company has released several cross-platform apps using Corona SDK. We have leveraged support for multiple app stores to further generate revenue from apps that might have historically only been released to the App Store and Google Play Store. ### 7. I've 2 years Experience with Corona SDK, it's fast, powerful and scalable. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammed F. | Software Engineer, Government Administration, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** - Less coding. - It's Physics engine is very good. - Build for a lot of platforms like Android, IOS and Windows phone 8. - Recommended for 2D Games and eBooks Apps. - New monetization model is very good like ads and IAP. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** - Business apps is very poor, it doesn't have a lot of UI widgets. - Poor UI customization for the current UI widgets. - Sometimes it's hard to debug errors. - Poor device testing methodology - Like maps, I have to test it on a real device because it doesn't work on Corona Simulator. - Poor Simulator. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was developing ebooks for children, Corona helped me fasten the development phase to deliver 40 stories in a very short time, this proves that Corona is a very good solution to my business for short time projects. ### 8. Game developing for 6 months **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anton S. | PHD Student, Research, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** The first thing I liked in Corona, is easy-testing feature. Before that I would have to compile the project and test on the mobile phone/phones/tablets. In corona I was able to test the program on different platform right away. Second, and it is also kinda related to the first, that by simple editing of the configure file you can make your program cross-platform. And the third, but I guess it was the most important for me during that period - is a great community. You basically can search for almost any question and get already an answer. And if you don't find it right away you can ask and get an answer pretty quick. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** I am not sure about current releases, but when I was doing game with Corona (2 years ago) there were no comparability with Linux. Also that time it was imposible to convert your code to HTML5 project for browser apps. **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** If you looking for a tool to create mobile app, and you don't want to worry a lot about how it would behave on different platforms Corona is a best choice. By using lua and having great API, Corona SDK allows you to concentrate on writing an app logic only, so you decrease the time you spending on making an app ready to go. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was a freelancer and after solving few simple problems with Corona I got a job for developing a game like-Monopoly. By using Corona I was able to create draft product super quick (like two weeks), so afterwards there were just setting textures with high quality, adding new features and bug fixing. ### 9. Corona for games **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** - Lua is easy to learn and use. Although it starts the loop with 0 - Compiles super fast, almost instant reload. Very valuable feature while doing rapid development. - Easy to handle graphic and image related stuff since the nature of the SDK - Compared with all the other competitors, at least within similar interested industries, Corona probably has the best community. And since it started so long ago, tutorials, Stackoverflow questions are all over there. Easy to handle most of the issue you encounter **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** - Any thing related to OS, it sucks. well not that much. it has improved a lot but still - The above reason makes it only suits a very use cases like games - Using lua will make you dumb, sort of. I mean you do need to learn swift **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** It's definitely a pleasure to try out Corona but it does has its limitations. I suggest check out the examples given on the corona's website and if you want to make something small-medium size like the examples on the website, you've come to the right way. Also lua is really easy to learn, so you'd have no problem finding developers. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** - All of my previous Corona works are games. - A couple games on the App store. Roughly a couple thousand every year. ### 10. Alright but now dated **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** At the time, Corona SDK was a very innovative way to get simple 2D games to mobile platforms without the burden of major league native language development. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** The LUA programming language is very limited and lacks features that advanced programmers would want to create a game that had an ambitious scope, therefore, the platform is best suited to simple games. Additionally, Corona's toolset was very minimal, with many quality of life features from other game engines completely missing, such as visual tools for creating collision boxes. **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** Unless you are completely married to the LUA language, strongly consider looking at GameMaker Studio, which has a similar design goal but has much more robust tools, a larger community, and is generally capable of producing larger, more sophisticated products. Additionally, GameMaker supports far more platforms than Corona. **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used this product in roughly 2010 and at the time, we needed a very fast pathway to get a 2D game to iOS with minimal engineering. Corona was able to fulfill this need reasonably well, but not without challenges. in 2016, there are other more competitive tools in the market that eclipse Corona's value proposition, sometimes for competitive fees ### 11. Story book using Corona SDK **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** We use Corona SDK to create several story books for both iOS and Android market. The best feature is that you just need to have one codebase to create an app. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** What I dislike from Corona SDK is how the implement the sound system. Their sound technology need to be upgraded because we have a hard time make it right. Most of the time, the sound is lagging behind several milliseconds making it look weird. **Recommendations to others considering Corona SDK:** Getting started with Corona is pretty easy. Plus, you can start getting dirty without spending any license money as Corona SDK is free to use (and to publish app with it). So, you can start prototyping your app. Plus, it uses LUA, the easiest language EVER! **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are in the business of making children apps for both iOS and Android and Corona SDK helped us prototype and iterate the development quickly. It also helped us manage smaller codebase as one codebase is enough to generate app into iOS and Android. The other benefit is that the community seems to be alive so that when we have problems, we can easily ask them for clues ### 12. Awesome SDK for crossing platform mobile developement **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hien N. | Senior Android Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Corona SDK?** This SDK offers many usefull APIs that can help you quickly boots your development in mobile. Especially useful if you are making a mobile game. Its community is huge so that you are provided many tutorials. **What do you dislike about Corona SDK?** Cost is still high and do not support android 2.x **What problems is Corona SDK solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm making a fishing game for mobile, this sdk help me solve the cross platform issues - [View Corona SDK pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/corona-sdk/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-15+18%3A14%3A53+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=aa165963-2275-4054-aa06-ec1140e22120&secure%5Btoken%5D=f776a9ae9db35d468aefd0b7be357e43e652e1476b744f6d9a83985371ddb081&format=llm_user) ## Corona SDK Features **Functionality** - Ease of Use - File Management - Multi-Language Support - Customization - Straight-Out-the-Box Functionality - Help Guides - Patching & Updates **Agentic AI - Mobile Development Platforms** - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance ## Top Corona SDK Alternatives - [Android Studio](https://www.g2.com/products/android-studio/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (617 reviews) - [.NET](https://www.g2.com/products/net-2023-06-12/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (148 reviews) - [Ionic: An OutSystems Company](https://www.g2.com/products/ionic-an-outsystems-company/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (150 reviews)