There is no material editor in Unity. If you want to do anything in Unity, you have to hardcode script it, which is very difficult to learn. What takes a few seconds to setup a nice material in UE4, put it in the world, and build lighting would take days to setup in Unity if you’re doing it from scratch. You’d have to rely on their marketplace for basically everything you need, which is kind of bare bones for an engine you have to keep paying for. If you’re a programmer, yeah, Unity can get you exactly what you want without any kind of bloat whatsoever. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on everyone else’s tools and balloon your budget.
UDK was very artist-oriented, and VERY FPS, but UE4 is breaking down those barriers. It’s much easier to use different gametypes now, and blueprints rock! I won’t lie, there is an overhead using UE4’s post processing and rendering engine, which includes everything from static and dynamic shadows to indirect, direct specular, and an entire reflection environment, so under traditional use you will see a lower framerate. However, if you disable all those fancy features (static lighting and lightmass only, dynamic shadows for up close, no reflections, no/minimal post process, basic materials, LOD/draw distance), you should be able to find a swift framerate in UE4 with beautiful rendering and a friendly interface to work with. A lot of people forget to use CullDistanceVolumes or LODs, so when they zoom out to view their entire level in the editor, rendering thousands of high-polygon plants the size of 3 pixels all over a 1080p screen with thousands of objects and it slows down, they wonder why. Well, the reason why is obvious. UE4 turns everything on by default: you have to turn it off if you want the game to run smoother.
At the moment, the only thing I’m really having trouble with is programming AI behavior trees. I’ve already done everything else in this engine, from basic character pickups to health and a dynamic footprint surface that responds to the physical materials of the surface below the character’s foot, triggered by anim notifies, and I’m not even a programmer. I’ve made cinematics, HUD systems, programmable shaders, particle VFX, I even made my own vertex animation system for a project that animated fish using UVs, sine waves, and world positions (which was much faster and smoother than bone animation, and yet people still have doubts about what this engine can do. It will do whatever you allow it.