I saw a comment like below on Reddit from 2017. Is it still true?
Don’t pick something like character art if you are going to solely use Blender, as people with Zbrush will be able to sculpt circles around you before you even get a base body shape in. (Trust me, I’m a character artist and have used both, and Zbrush is X10 more efficient.)
well that’s a 2017 statement so …
I have also used both ( not as a professional though) but I have used both.
my experience sculpting in both software was that:
blender
it’s free
it’s fast
with so many updates it can handle a pretty decent amount of polygons (that is if using multi resolution modifiers, which zbrush also uses the same thing with a different name)
it’s easy to learn and have a very friendly user interface
it has built in rendering engines and better modelling tools
Zbrush
in terms of handling polygons it’s faster than blender and can handle overall more polygons
has a faster voxel remesher (which is a fast way of remeshing while sculpting)
it has a wider set of tools for sculpting (it’s a sculpting software after all)
I think it’s faster on undos and redos
in my opinion if you are trying to get to a triple A game studio or a large vfx studio you probably want to use zbrush as it’s the industry standard.
but as far as sculpting goes
both software are very capable, so at the end of the day it’s your skills that matter not the software you are using. with zbrush a sculpting software being around for much longer it has much more pre made assets and tools online if you are trying to do some very detailed and advance complex works.
but as far as overall capability goes they are not that different.
Zbrush is still the best 3D sculpting tool. Blender also offers decent digital sculpting tool set. You do not have a lot of choices when it comes to high resolution 3d sculpting tools. Blender is a decent contender. It can definitely be used for high quality work.
I think it also depends on what kind of characters you’re making, and what your own skillset is.
If you’re new and you’re just getting started, then you’d potentially be wasting a lot of time with Zbrush, not to mention money, if you automatically think it’s somehow gonna make you a better artist just because its the ‘industry standard’. Not that that’s necessarily how OP sees it, but plenty do have that attitude.
I’d say for most people, Blender is an excellent, and extremely capable tool for creating characters of all kinds, across a variety of styles.
If you’re a veteran though, with years of experience in the field, then Blender will likely frustrate the hell out of you - though I guess that’s true in generally anyway, regardless of subject matter.
Go watch a flycat video.
There is a big catch with those what-is-better questions… there are multiple parameter which are on different sides od the spectrum:
etc. … and of course personal taste…
You could ask two persons doing things in almost the same area and with similar stimulation… and… get two completly different opinions…
…and what was already mentioned differetn apps change differetnly over time…
Dude saying “Zbrush is x10 more efficient” clearly doesn’t have much perspective. At best, he works in a team where he is relegated to sculpting only, and other modelers are fixing his shit. At worst, just some amateur. Zbrush only becomes more efficient if your goal is making figures straight for 3d printing. For making a character which is useful for gamedev or animation, Blender is better as it is a complete package. Zbrush will need 2 or 3 other programs to compete. Surely Blender doesn’t support as many polygons, but sculpting every skin pore is bad workflow in most cases. It is better to combine sculpting with regular poly modeling intelligently. Like creating a topology mesh first, and detailing it using Multires sculpt later. Or using Dyntopo for making quick sketches which you’ll retopologize later, if you design characters yourself
Yes, Blender is better in a lot of things that other packages are missing, because Blender is not sculpting-software-only 
I def agree with you on a lot of things, but unfortunately Zbrush has a lot of advantages when it comes to an efficient workflow, not even talking about the sculping itself. I’m sculpting in Blender myself and am missing a lot of things; when it comes to “you don’t need high poly counts”, yes, but when you work with high level details in combination with e.g. Mari it’s far better with Zbrush.
Def depends on your role in a production environment and I absolutely understand why a lot of studios use Zbrush for sculpting and not blender.
Does this make Zbrush better than Blender? For a lot of things required in production settings - yes, absolutely. In general? No, because Blender is a whole package.
Coming back to the original topic, as I heard from another sculptor - if you’re starting out, start with Blender. Sculpting skills are transferable and it doesn’t matter which software you’re starting out in, it matters that you practice sculpting. If you then decide to apply for jobs in game/film positions, you can always pick up Zbrush (or be so good that you may inspire others to look at sculpting in Blender 
) .
It’s far easier and faster to learn software than it is to learn the things you do in that particular software, e.g. modelling and sculpting.
I keep seeing this, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but one of the things that made me not want to use ZBrush was how many extra steps everything seemed to have, and I used ZBrush for long enough to become comfortable with the software and learn a lot of the short cuts. So seeing people say this makes me wonder what it is that I was missing.
Then again, I don’t run into the blender and high poly count issue as quickly as a lot of people mention, so it’s entirely possible ZBrush is more efficient on that front, and I just never noticed, because I never felt the need to go beyond the poly count my computers and blender could handle in either software.
It absolutely may be that it’s because I still am not skilled enough in Blender, but something I really liked in Zbrush was the built-in workflow for:
I absolutely love Blender but in contrast to Zbrush it often times feels frustrating, especially with me running into high polycount issues and therefore crashes
I still do not see Zbrush being efficient in anything other than sculpting. (OP said “character creation”, not limited to sculpting, and strictly compared Zbrush with Blender). Zbrush is the best sculpting program for sure, but most of its other features exist “just because”. From my experience, its render and animation capabilities are joke, procedural objects (micromesh, tripart curve brushes, hair system and so on) do not transfer to other DCCs and better to be replicated with their tools, finally, its logic of working with scenes is just bizarre, relic of its past as painting program.
And again, it is debatable if having absurd details on a single mesh is a good practice, when animation and game art exist. The more details you put into sculpt, the more effort you’ll spend on retopo and fixing baking errors. Things like spikes or dragon scales, in short any details which aren’t aligned with surface normal, cannot be properly baked into anything other than vector displacement maps. Not only VDMs are scarcely supported outside Zbrush, but you also need to bake them for your final topology, so constant remeshing only complicates things
Ah, my bad, then I misinterpreted the topic I thought it’s solely about sculpting (and the workflow for character artists in a pipeline where they need to sculpt before its going to retopo for anim)
Regarding the high details I was thinking more in lines of sculpting for high displacement for film Not VDMs
whoever wrote that is not honest.
creating Basemeshes with correct scale and proportions is insanely more easy with Blender due to the fact that Blender offers;
real dimensions, I know exactly how big an object is in my scene with accurate size since i have mm, meters etc.
real perspective
ZBrushs perspective is at best described wonky, people cope with ZBrush viewport in a way to import and export their meshes regularly into wherever they want to create their final visual output.
Making a likeness in ZBrush can be heartbreaking when you bring it into your renderer and it looks nothing like the real person.
Others disable the perspective view to not have to deal with the gobshite which ZBrushs viewport is.
Blender on the other hand gives you a real visual perspective.
couple other pro points speaking for Blender;
Zbrush is in my opinion only better when it comes to “later” steps, wanting to do extreme detailing like sculpt each and every individual pore of the skin.
Otherwise with the right amount of workflow, knowledge and an occasional plugin in the mix, I would say the differences are negligible.
greetings from a ZBrush user who bought and used it since 2012.
Ps; Best advice I can give is to try out those programs but don´t be fooled by marketing speak.
What matters is that you learn how to get results out of those programs.
ZBrush has lost its coolness factor due to bad business practices.
one being that perpetual purchases (one time purchases) as well as maintenance (you pay to keep the license update/upgrade path active) are getting less features than those which pay for subscriptions.
Vector displacement maps were meant to cover edge cases impossible for regular heightmap displacement (say, snakehook or using grab brush through the mask). Sadly, not much support anywhere.
If you’re looking for a job in vfx or games, chances are you’ll have to ship high resolution characters, and Zbrush is the only one that can handle a virtually infinite amount of geometry with good performance. It was also built directly around industry needs, so the modeling pipeline is very streamlined, it’s just made to output potentially very complex characters. Blender is not a contender right now in the performance space, although purely functionality-wise it’s not too far off, being so general-purpose has its benefits. Let’s see if the Institute can reform a sculpt module, I think right now Sergey is alone working on landing Joe’s patches.
During those last 6 years, evolutions of each software were not comparable.
Zbrush’s evolution contained big features changing workflow speeding it up.
That is impossible not to acquire some, in 6 years.
But Blender literally acquired new essential abilities, each trimester.
( EEVEE, Grease Pencil 2, Voxel Remeshing, Sculpt mode refactor, Geometry Nodes, Asset Browser, Color Attributes painting, New Hair )
Of course, you work a lot faster in Blender 3.6 than in Blender 2.79.
Were changes between Zbrush 2023 and Zbrush 2018 as essential that same amount of speed was gained ?
If your answer is no, you have to concede that gap between the two pieces of software was reduced.
That statement was not correct in 2017, anyways.
In 2.79, the skin modifier was already allowing to obtain quickly a base body shape.
There were addons distributing metaballs or Bsurfaces addon allowing to quickly obtain a surface from Grease Pencil Strokes.
And there was already Dyntopo.
Since 3.6, we have an asset bundle of Base Meshes.
The weakness of Blender was not in first steps of workflow, it was (and still is) in middle and last ones.
But it is true that there are essential things, that are still missing or complicated in Blender, while they are present or easy in Zbrush.
You just need to read The Big Blender Sculpt Mode Thread.
There are the recurrent requests made in it about certain brushes (Polish, Insert mesh), custom symmetry, multires reliability, sculpting layers, more retopology tools, better automated remeshing algorithms, painting, baking, …
I did like that feature
ZBrush specializes in sculpting, but it has more more confusing and bad (for me) UI than Blender.
Well… this is like comparing a general toolbox with lots of tools with a pocket bag to protect a dedicated tool … different use cases → different appliance… you also don’t want to have this:
Or another example: some people do wood carving… this could be everthing between:
So is it chain saw carving because some did used a chain saw for the first rough “sketches” or is it handicraft even if electrical tools were used… some even use 3Dmilling machines…
So is this art or “cloning” ?? Is it art because some chain saws from producer XYZ is used and not if it a cheap whatever-country-manufactorer was used ?
So yes a specialiest tool may be better to use for a special purpose if (and only if) the user knows how to handle this…
I am not an extra guru. But I think zbrush is easier for beginners in sculpting.
For example when I was beginner I was using blender and zbrush, and I am still considering me beginnger level.
In any case, I fouond blender easy to use to position shapes and run 3D like a sketch, and I can go jump in editmode and sculptmode use modifiers to build pieces, I use skin modifier very often when blocking out a character and in blender these operations are made very convenient and easy.
Outside of the blockingout stage, blender is not ideal for beginners, it is more complicated. It is usable, but its hard for beginners to do stuff with it.
Zbrush instead is beginner friendly. Pros will say that zbrush has the “weird interface” that scares people off, its not the case, because zbrush has a way to introduce you to all its tools and you dont feel scared at all by the complexity since you can use zbrush knowing only 5 bruses and summon them all with shortcuts, learning it bit by bit. You can be productive in zbrush by day one, while with the expansion of your skills will just come more refinement and better ability to create almost everything.
Theres this guy on youtube offering you a real perspective. Is it possible to make a real character that works in premium games, all with blender? He says yes its possible:
What you notice immediately is that he is a pro. These people, the uber pros, they would make an amazing character also using one of those webapps for sculpting, its all in their already acquired skills. Do not think you can do the same in zbrush or blender just because yuo picked one of the 2. And, zbrush will help you more if yuore a beginner. This guy instead reminds us all that skills matter more.
In any case, the answer to your question is: Yes, blender can be used to make uberpro characters. Only that I tihnk its incorrect what they say online, they tend to say that zbrush is complicated with what they call the “weird interface”. I dont find it to be true, I think zbrush is made for halfassed “pros” and for beginners such as myself. I will find more at ease with zbrush, and infact I often make base sculpt in blender, export and import in zbrush because of the speed I achieve there and the amount of brushes I can use.