Unity Plugin VS Unity Package

Hi,

What is the difference between Unity Plugin and Unity package except that Unity Pro is required for a Unity Plugin?

Thanks!

Plugin: is a dll or set of classes that is sometimes platform specific, generally these are scripts or dlls only. They only require Unity Pro on Standalone and Web, not on mobile and only for native dlls, not for scripts.

Package: can contain plugins, but normally will also contains assets as in images or 3d models.

To answer that, we’d have to define “Unity Plugin” first. That’s a pretty abstract idea.

Ultimately, plugins are just some code that your application uses. Some plugins require Unity Pro, either to run native code or for access to other Pro-only features… and some don’t need any of that. NGUI, for example, is an extremely popular UI plugin which doesn’t require Unity Pro. What does the plugin need? That depends on the plugin.

A Unity Package is a file containing some compressed assets. They might be code… or they might be scene files, models, animations, textures, prefabs, or any other asset Unity can use. What’s in the package? That depends on the package.

A plugin could be raw source code, or a compiled DLL file. It could be given to you directly, in a .unitypackage file, or in some other compressed format.