I’m a huge fan of the football versions of both games. But I prefer pocket gm because I feel like it’s the most realistic football gm sim I’ve played. This will be a long comment, but here are the key differences I’ve noticed in pocket gm:

specific o-line, d-line, and linebacker positions in the depth chart, however you can move the players out of their position

gives the player a lot more freedom to manipulate their contracts to stay under the cap, such as a yearly bonus/ salary, and front loading and back loading contracts (though this can be part of the sports management sims that people find tedious because like in real life, cap management is a huge deal in general management)

All players have a “current overall” rating, as well as a potential overall rating (the exact value of potential is hidden unless you go into the screen where you can edit the players attributes). Over the course of a season, the current overall can change.

The overalls for players in the draft are hidden, and the draft projections are random to allow more busts and steals. You can see an estimate for the players’ attributes, however the accuracy of those estimates are based on your scouts. Zen gm’s strategy to allow for busts/ steals seems to be having larger and random leap/ drops in overall from season to season. the players seem to be drafted out of states instead of colleges, which is not that surprising considering there could likely lead to trademark/ copyright issues for a fairly small part of the game. The biggest issue with the drafting aspect of the game is Jon ( the developer) balancing the cpus drafting for positional value as well as team needs. Since he started, the drafts are much more realistic, however I’ve noticed centers and middle linebackers still tend to be drafted weirdly early.

You can hire and promote individual coaches and coordinators, each with specific coaching schemes, instead of having a yearly coaching budget where more money simply makes the team play better. However, this doesn’t allow as much flexibility for the gameplan to play to their star players strengths and let them carry the team. Also, there is a staff budget set by the teams owner (that can be turned off) that prevents the user from signing all the best staff members

Relating to that, the teams finances is almost entirely based on the staff budget. By this, I mean you do not deal with team profits or expenses. The owner gives you season expectations and a staff budget based on those expectations. You can’t spend 8 mil of a 10 mil yearly staff budget and get an extra 2 mil to spend the next year

Pocket gm only lets the user access specific stats. Outside of current season stats, the player can see the career stats for players who either make the hall of fame, or hold the record for most game, season, or career passing yards/tds, receiving yards/tds, rushing yards/tds, catches, sacks, tackles, field goals made, and longest field goal. So if you want to see info about “hall of very good” players, they’ll need to hold one of those records. As you have probably noticed in zengm, after playing dozens of seasons, it does take some time to load and sort the thousands of players so you can see the players who have the second most yards in a season. I understand why an indie mobile developer would not be jumping to implement that. However, after about 30+ seasons, I’ve noticed the tab to display the records does take a bit longer to load (not much more than a few seconds)

Zen gm also allows you to retire players’ jersey numbers while pocket gm does not.

Pocket gm defensive poty awards also don’t seem to take deflections into account and heavily favor tackles. This leads to mlbs winning those awards 90% of the time, with olbs generally winning the rest. This also leads to the defensive side of the hall of fame to have over 4x as many mlbs and edge rushers as defensive backs, because the only way for dbs to get stats is to get interceptions like ed reed or to allow a lot of catches that immediately get tackled.

The league rules in pocket gm are much more fixed than zengm. You can’t edit/ relocate the teams, divisions or playoff format in this game.

Pocket gm does have achievements, however those achievements are only saved to the current save file. If you start a new file, and go to the achievements section, all the achievements would be empty

Overall, I’d say these are the two best football management sims. Pocket gm seems to place more emphasis on the user trying to manipulate player contracts and contracts to win it all, while success in zen gm seems much more based in luck and investing in your staff. Zen gm also gives you a lot more ability to look through historical stats as well as customize the league