Perforce vs Diversion for Unreal Engine Projects

Perforce has been the default for game studios for decades. It works. But "works" comes with a lot of baggage such as cost, complexity, and workflows designed for a different era.

Here's how Diversion compares for Unreal Engine teams. For our full comparison, visit our Diversion vs Perforce comparison page.

Setup and maintenance

Perforce: Self-hosted servers, dedicated IT staff, complex configuration. Getting a new team member set up can take hours. Maintaining the infrastructure is an ongoing job.

Diversion: Cloud-native. Sign up, install, start working. New team members clone and go. No servers to babysit.

Cost

Perforce: Licenses plus infrastructure plus the people to manage it. Costs scale awkwardly as your team grows. Updating licensing is painful.

Diversion: Subscription-based, up to 70% lower total cost of ownership. Free tier for small teams. No infrastructure to pay for.

Performance

Perforce: Can slow under heavy load. Sync issues between local and server cause problems on larger projects.

Diversion: Commit 400K files in under 30 seconds. Scales to repos with millions of files. Built for the large binary files that game projects generate.

Usability

Perforce: P4V is functional but dated. Steep learning curve, especially for artists and designers who aren't version control experts.

Diversion: Modern UI designed for entire teams and not just for programmers. Artists can commit their work without learning complex new workflows.

Unreal Engine integration

Perforce: Works with Unreal, but requires configuration. No built-in conflict prevention.

Diversion: Official Unreal Engine plugin on the Fab Marketplace. You get a warning you before conflicts happen. Blueprint merge support built in.

Migration

Already on Perforce? Diversion supports migration from P4. Your workflows stay intact, history preserved. Most teams transition in under a week. Contact us to learn more.

The bottom line

Perforce is proven. But it was built for a world with different constraints – before cloud infrastructure, before teams went fully remote, before game projects routinely hit hundreds of gigabytes.

Diversion was built for how teams work now. Faster, simpler, cheaper.