Your point is fair. I suppose it depends on what one considers ‘balanced’. The article was written by someone outside this forum and indeed, outside the Foundry community. It is certainly an opinionated piece, and while it doesn’t give equal word count to each system, it does compare/contrast the choices and then dives in to a more detailed look at Foundry. That is why in the article title it says ‘a perspective’.

~10 lines of text for roll20
~17 lines of text for Fantasy Grounds, including an admission of only “a dozen or so clicks in the online demo”
then
~67 lines about foundry, including details and examples of use.

I realise this site favours foundry, but in no way is this “balanced”.

Foundry is more bare bones and begins with having to chose a host, that being to say the least you have to spend some time, download a package and understand how to host it and make your players reach it. For a LOT of people that’s a no-go from scratch. Hosting yourself requires basic network understanding and willing to spend time to check how to do it.

If you have a bad connection or low upload speed, it will also hit a roof soon so you’ll want to consider hosting, which means money and that is already losing against free-to-play alternatives.

I would also add a few bits about Astral Tabletop, which hasn’t been mentioned much:
Astral is FREE to play and it is GREAT for map-builders, because it includes out of the box map editing tools and assets (free and paid).

It is also good for custom or weird systems, because building sheets is non-technical and anyone can do it.
IT has other disadvantages like feeling a bit clunky, and they prioritized a lot Fog of War features over functionality and system support, so there it goes, but it is totally worth it to be checked out.

To start out, there are a lot of VTT options out there now and more coming. Of the more readily available ones that I’ve tinkered with, Roll20 is my bottom choice.

R20’s biggest selling points are its accessibility and the number of RPG rules systems it supports. On the latter, I believe they are still in the lead with the number of systems that are officially supported. Also, if you’re of the coding sort, they do offer a pretty easy to use toolset for making your own.

On accessibility, R20 is entirely web-browser based. There is no need to download/install any software. Both the GMs and players access the game session via their browsers.

The cons for R20 far outweigh the pros, IMO. Even with the accessibility thing, the downside to this is that GMs need to always have an internet connection to work on their games. Also, everyone is reliant on an internet service that can obviously be down for whatever reason. That said, R20 doesn’t have a history of chronic outages but I still think it’s important to remember that your ability to play your game is a little bit out of your control.

Another con for R20 is that they rested on their laurels for a long time and other systems passed them by in terms of bells and whistles and visual appeal. Now they’re playing catch-up and that’s never a great place to be.

The final con for R20 that I care to mention is the biggest one. Roll20 is expensive. They only offer a monthly subscription model and, even purchasing it a year at a time, the cost surpasses all other offerings quickly. One caveat though is that it is possible to run a full game on R20 without spending a dime but the limitations of this are quickly felt. Finally, if D&D 5E is specifically your thing, official WotC content is much more expensive in the R20 marketplace than its main competitor, Fantasy Grounds.

Fantasy Grounds is a much better value in that it offers a lifetime licensing option. By buying a license and using it less than a couple of years continuously, FG becomes cheaper than R20. From there, it only gets more and more economical. Additionally, FG’s marketplace content is generally cheaper, especially so for the D&D 5E stuff. For example, most sourcebooks in R20, such as they’re presented, run $40 or more. In FG, they can almost always be had via one sale/coupon or another for about $25.

The only monetary area where FG is behind R20 is that you need at least one player (ostensibly the GM) to have a paid license to have a game. Also, that license must be the most expensive one (ultimate) or the players will have to pay for theirs as well. Still, with a year and a half commitment, the lifetime license becomes cheaper than R20’s monthly subscription model.

Operationally, one big difference with FG is that it is actual software that you have to download and install. This is true for all the players involved. It can be resource intensive so it will be a barrier that some users can’t overcome because they have older computers or only mobile devices at their disposal.

The other big operational difference is that there is no “external” hosting service for your games. Or at least there wasn’t (more on that in bit) until recently. With Fantasy Grounds, the GM “hosts” the game and the players connect directly to the GM’s computer for the game. This requires some knowhow that used to be more of a barrier when FG first came out. But nowadays, much console gaming is self-hosted and just about anyone can easily manage the network settings config (IP port-forwarding and the like) to set up a game.

With the new version of Fantasy Grounds (named Unity) however, the developer Smiteworks has included a “cloud” option for hosting games. They provide a service where GMs can host their games in the cloud and the players all connect to this service instead of the GM’s computer. My experience has been that this works well enough but that self-hosting, especially if you have a good rig and internet connection, is faster and better.

Another area where FG is stronger is in automating in-game activities, particularly around combat encounters. Now, I speak from a limited perspective in that I’ve only used FG for 5E but even “out of the box”, nothing can touch it in this area. R20 does have a legion of followers who have developed mods that can be added to streamline things as well. But the same is true with FG’s following and the software’s starting point for automation is much more robust.

All that said, FG is not without its weaknesses; actually, one very big weakness in particular. Simply put, the Fantasy Grounds UI is severely lacking. Not only is there a significant learning curve for using the tool, the interface isn’t at all intuitive. I speak from experience when I say that’s a big put-off for many people.

Moving along, besides the “big two”, there are an ever-growing number of alternatives which I’ll touch on very quickly.

The first one is my current favorite option, FoundryVTT. Foundry also currently has a lifetime licensing model though I imagine if it takes off, that may change. It uses a hybrid approach in that the game host (GM) must install software on their computer to host games. However, players connecting to the game do so via their web browser. Like FG, Foundry works best when the game is self-hosted but also like FG, there are a handful of third-party (cloud) hosting options out there though these do usually come with a cost.

The downside to FVTT is that it is very much still in development. It is very sharp looking and is much more intuitive to use than FG but the features list is very much a work in progress. There is the caveat that it too has a following and there are many third-party mods that make running a game easier. With or without these, Foundry isn’t so limited that it makes running a remote game difficult or even any harder than other other options available. I for one have been running two regular games during the pandemic, one of which I switched off of R20 in order to save some bucks, using Foundry without much issue.

Moving along, besides the three already mentioned, there are other VTT options out there. Tabletop Simulator jumps to mind but I don’t have any experience with it. There’s also another fully web-based outfit named Astral that seems to be closer to Foundry in functionality and visual polish than it is to R20. And there are still others already out there.

Finally, there are a couple of really new options that are actually both in Kickstarter as I write this. I think they bear mentioning.

Let’s Role is from a European developer and it’s been in Alpha for a couple of years almost. Like Foundry, they started on Patreon and they seem to offer pretty open architecture to allow users to develop their own mods and customizations for it. It’s also very sharp-looking and from the videos I’ve seen at least, it seems to be pretty excellent with animated scenes/battle maps.

Then there’s Shard Tabletop. What distinguishes this tool is that it seems to favor a KISS (keep it simple stupid) approach by providing only that which is needed to run a D&D 5E game. Which is important because it is the only RPG system it supports. Another factor that distinguishes Shard is that they’ve partnered with basically all of the biggest third-party content creators for 5E. Their list of partners includes Kobold Press, Troll Lord Games, Nord Games, Sly Flourish, and numerous others. About the only “big” name that’s missing are the Frog Gods.

I can’t conclude without adding one HUMONGOUS caveat to the discussion. The Fandom (aka D&D Beyond) folks have been hinting that they have their own plans in the remote-gaming/VTT area. To date, they haven’t been too forthcoming though. They do have a pretty robust toolset in the “play by post” approach via their acquisition and extensive development of the Avrae bot for Discord. But there has to be some more “there” there. When they do finally wade into the realm of virtual tabletop play fully, you can bet your butt whatever they do will have significant repercussions on all the players already in this arena.

Assuming you don’t go plug-in crazy, Foundry offers a very stable platform on which to host your games. You should recognize that the more plugins you add, the more complexity you are creating in your environment. The more plugins, the more you should expect authors to drop support, fail to provide timely updates, etc. Foundry at its core is very stable and mainstream plugins are frequently updated by the fantastic community of plugin authors.

Let’s not forget the great support from the volunteers in the official Discord channel. You won’t find a more helpful community anywhere on the webernetz. 🙂

I also agree that one has to really dive into programming/coding to take full advantage of FG’s automation capabilities. The key point is that FG has a 10-year head-start on FoundryVTT in that its community-driven development library is vast. It includes often multiple options of mods and extensions that automate the same activities.

That said, FG’s interface/UI is “a bridge too far” for many. Which is why, having tinkered extensively in all three (Roll20 included) for the last year, Foundry is the best of the three options currently.

I also don’t think it is that automated. Maybe for 5E, but for Pathfinder 2E, I get frustrated at how little I can automate without getting into scripting.