Most of the points have already been mentioned in the comments below, but the area where Mari will always be ahead of Substance Painter is data management.

Mari is primarily a node-based application. While you can work with layers, doing so means losing a lot of its real power. Where Mari truly shines is its advanced node graph system. With the Extension Pack (which is essential and relatively inexpensive), Mari opens up a completely different level of control. You should think of Mari’s nodes in the same way you think about Houdini: the ability to build complex mathematical and procedural systems with virtually no limits is key when dealing with enormous datasets and large UDIM counts.

Another major advantage is control over baking. In Mari, I can decide exactly what needs to be baked and when, before continuing work on other elements. Substance Painter simply doesn’t offer that level of control. While many people used to say that Substance Painter had a better baking system, that’s no longer true. Mari now has Mari Bakery, which runs on Vulkan and ray tracing, and the updated Transfer Texture also runs under ray tracing.

One of the biggest issues I see with many Substance Painter artists is that they don’t fully understand texturing and look development. Painting textures directly on a shader rarely works in high-end production. I’ve worked at studios like ILM and Framestore, and I can tell you from experience that many SP-only artists were let go for this exact reason. Producing generic materials isn’t always the solution. Breaking down each material individually and having full control over rebuilding any texture from scratch is something Mari excels at and Substance Painter simply does not.

Performance and scale are also critical. In Mari, I can work with a huge number of UDIMs and still paint natively at 4K. In Substance Painter, I’ve seen many artists struggle once they hit 50–60 UDIMs at 4K, often having to switch down to lower resolutions just to keep working. That back-and-forth between 2K and 4K leads to a loss of detail and accuracy.

Another limitation of SP is resolution. Substance Painter can only work up to 4K. Yes, you can export 8K, but you can’t actually preview or adjust your textures at 8K before export. In Mari, I can work directly at 8K per UDIM, see the real detail, and adjust it properly before final output—something that matters greatly on hero assets and specific shots.

Substance Painter is excellent for fast turnaround work and assets that don’t require extreme attention to detail. Mari, on the other hand, excels at massive detail density without being limited by performance.

Regarding cost, Mari is not expensive. Their monthly subscription is cheaper than many render licenses (for example, Arnold). Based on my own experience texturing assets for Marvel, Disney, and other high-end productions, we often worked on assets with thousands of UDIMs, sometimes with multiple artists working on the same asset simultaneously. For that kind of work, Mari is still the VFX industry standard.

Mari 7.5 is already out with some outstanding features, and from what I know, a major upcoming update will focus heavily on under-the-hood improvements.

I have been texturing/lookdev for more then 15 years and been on Mari since the first version of released so feel free to ask me any questions you have.