An explanation as to why Modrinth is a better modding platform than Curseforge. If you find new information or if any info shown here is outdated or incorrect, feel free to make a PR to this repo.
If you ever used Curseforge in any capacity in the past year or so, you probably have noticed the horrendous use of advertisements, the UI bugs and many other nonsensical things Curseforge has done.
Screenshot of the advertisements seen on CF as a normal user.
These UI problems have not been fixed for 4-ish years since Curseforge's "redesign".
Screenshot of a common UI bug. Note that the mouse cursor is not on any of the category links.
Sometimes the UI bug (pictured above) happens when you switch tabs on CF's Minecraft page.
Not only is there terrible usage of advertisements and UI bugs, there is general inconsistency on CF as shown below
Curseforge's search is very clunky at best and outright broken at worst. For example, it's impossible to specify "Fabric", "1.18.2", and a category the mod you want might be in. You are stuck having to specify "Fabric" and a category and then scrolling until you find the mod you want. While searching via the search bar works, it takes you to a different page where all you have is a search bar to input what you want in. No categories, no Minecraft versions, no modloader filters, etc.
The new CurseForge API has only been pain since the very beginning, making life harder for launchers/mod managers/modpack builders with a restrictive ToS, locking API access behind a non-transferable key which can't be behind a proxy, and introducing an opt-in system for mod distribution for third party apps.
The Curseforge API is plagued with issues such as "concurrent outages", where it starts acting up when too many requests are sent and removes mods from the the API.
CurseForge has been known to not allow mods it hosts to be used in modpacks hosted on other 3rd party platforms such as Modrinth.
Curseforge has a habit of giving preferential treatment to popular modpacks/mods and/or groups who make popular modpacks/mods.
While CF does have clunky search, bad UI/UX, horrendous use of advertisements and so on, it does have some advantages over Modrinth such as...
- Has the most mods of any modding platform
- Pays out to authors
- Known to most MC players
- Has MC world support
- Has an area with a randomized selection of Curseforge projects
- If you are an author on Curseforge, you do not see any advertisements
In short; search that actually works, very good UI/UX, great implementation of advertisements, has very minimal UI bugs.
Modrinth's ads comply with the acceptable ads standard. That means...
- Only one ad per page
- Ads are less than 130 pixels tall
- Ads are easily distinguished from site content
The Modrinth UI on the mods page is more consistent than Curseforge's mod page UI.
Modrinth's search is far better than the clunky search CF has. You can specify what categories to search in, what Minecraft versions to filter, what modloaders to filter, and use your searchbar input all without leaving the mods page.
Modrinth now has payouts and they are based on page views on your mod pages.
Modrinth supports old modloaders such as Rift, Risugami's modloader, and Liteloader. Modrinth is willing to and does fix issues on their platform. (Thanks MrMelon54 for bringing this up in #4)
While Modrinth excels in search, UI/UX, usage of advertisements and so on, there are some disadvantages to using Modrinth such as...
- Doesn't have an area with a randomized selection of mods
A list of people who provided statements and screenshots for use in this repo.
- Thanks to Prospector, woodiertexas, and Acrafts for providing screenshots.
- TayouVR: Updated Modrinth screenshots (#3)
- Eskaan: Statement about CF's API problems.
- DioEgizio: Pull Request for info about CF's new API. (#1)
- GhostIsBeHere: Pointing out that modrinth has added resourcepacks and plugins, hosted significantly more mods, and become much more well known. (#5)
- FnigePython for their correction regarding ad height in #7
- Ghost-chu for the payouts edit in #8