The following article about the best unity 2d plugins has been written with the intent to help your team choose between the best unity plugins to develop your games.

Why we use plugins? The answer is easy: To save a lot of time. Unity 2d plugins are made to make our life easier. Even if you think that some of them are expensive, the price is still extremely cheap compared to the time that you’d have to spend to develop those solutions by yourself.

Texture Packer

Sprite sheets for everyone

One of the best unity plugins that help you to create amazing and optimised sprite sheets.

Here is a short description of what this plugin does:

“The TexturePacker Importer extends the Unity editor to read sprite atlas data created with Texture Packer. It imports each sprite atlas as native Unity 2D sprite sheet, the sprites can directly be used in the editor”

Alternatively, you can use the unity sprite packer tool which is built into the editor, but I prefer this one because it optimises the meshes better compared to the unity sprite packer and it gives you better control over how the sprite sheets are created.

You can find TexturePacker on the asset store at this link.

Price: 39.99€

Best Animations Unity 2d plugins

Here is a list of the most used unity 2d plugins for animations. Some of them can also be used for 3d projects.

Itween

On of the best unity 2d plugins available in the asset store. It has more than 2252 positive reviews and it comes for free. It has a lot of helpful tools to help you create amazing and simple animations via code.

Short description from the asset store:

“More “wow” for a lot less “ow”. iTween is a simple, powerful and easy to use animation system for Unity.”

Here is the link to the plugin.

Price: FREE.

AE2Unity: After Effect To Unity Animation

Are you used to working with Adobe After Effects? No problem! With this unity plugin, you can directly import your after effects animations directly into unity. All animations are converted into native animations.

Here is the link to the asset store, if you want, there is also a pro version but is a little expensive.

Price: 22.23 €

Puppet2D

Animate directly into Unity

A great unity 2d plugin to animate your character directly into unity.

Short description about this plugin:

“Puppet2D is an advanced 2D Skeletal Animation Tool. Animating 2D characters in Unity is made easy with bones, controls and mesh skinning for 2D sprites.”

Here is the link to the asset.

Price: 40.20€

Ultimate mobile:

Do you need to integrate native services into your game? This plugin is what you need. From google admob to in-app purchase. This plugin has all you need to integrate native os services into your game. It supports Windows phone, iOS and Android.

Here is the store link:

Price: 62.53€

I2 Localization:

Do you know that you must localize your game to increase its visibility? This is one of the best unity plugins that ads localizations to your game.

A short description of this plugin from the asset store:

“This is currently the most complete localization system available for Unity.

Supports
– Unity UI, Unity 2D, NGUI, TextMesh Pro, DF-GUI, 2D ToolKit, SVG Importer, Standard Components

Localizes
– Image, Text, Sounds, Fonts, Sprites, Atlases, Prefabs, TextMeshes, and more.

Auto Translation
Built-in support for Google Translator to automatically localize all your labels into any language.
”

Here is the link to the store.

Price:  40.20€

Asset Hunter PRO

We all do experiments in our unity projects, we often forget to clean our projects from unused assets. This unity plugin does the dirty jobs for you.

Short description from the asset store:

“Asset Hunter is a tool that analyses your build log and gives you an easily understandable overview over unused assets in your project folder.”

The results are grouped into folders and file types, making it easy to start cleaning up your project.

Here the link to the asset store.

Price: 22.33€

Help the community

Hey wait a second, did you found any interesting plugin? If yes share this article, you will help a lot of other developers to make great games, if you didn’t found any useful plugin, please leave a comment with your preferred ones or ask for the one that you’re looking for and I’ll do my best to find the right one for you.

Thanks

Marco