BetterOutliner - improved Unreal Engine Outliner - with persistence and lock!

Distribution Product Discussion
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Hey everyone!

I built BetterOutliner to remove one of those small but incredibly frustrating parts of working in Unreal Engine: constantly losing your carefully arranged Outliner state, ever opening tree.

BetterOutliner adds persistent Outliner profiles and a simple padlock for folders. Lock the folders and hierarchies you care about, and the plugin remembers their state between sessions. No more repeatedly expanding the same folders or rebuilding your workspace every time you reopen the Editor.

The goal is simple: less clicking, less frustration, and more time spent actually building your game.

Current support

  • Platform: Windows
  • Unreal Engine: 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8
  • UE 5.4 and 5.3 are currently being ported and should be available by the end of this week.
  • Current Version 1.0.0

Known issue

Some BetterOutliner entries may remain visible or appear duplicated in Unreal Engine’s Window menu.

The root cause has been found, and the fix is already en route. It will ship together with the upcoming UE 5.3 and 5.4 compatibility update, with the correction applied across all supported versions.

Installation

  1. Open the Epic Games Launcher and install BetterOutliner to your engine.
  2. Select the compatible Unreal Engine version.
  3. Open an existing project or create a new one.
  4. In Unreal Editor, go to Edit → Plugins.
  5. Search for BetterOutliner.
  6. Enable the plugin by ticking its checkbox.
  7. Restart Unreal Editor when prompted.
  8. After restarting, open Window → BetterOutliner to access the plugin.

Links

BetterOutliner is only the beginning. In the future, it will work alongside BetterLayers and other tools designed to improve the everyday Unreal Engine workflow.

I’d also love to hear from you: what features or quality-of-life improvements would you like to see added to the Outliner? Tell me what wastes your time or regularly drives you mad.

Every purchase helps fund the MMO project I’m currently working on, so thank you for supporting both the plugin and the game behind it.

Let’s make the Outliner great again.