Play Framework - activator vs sbt

Looks like they're dropping support for activator in Play 2.6:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/play-framework/NeMD04W6bN4

So I guess if you decide to use Play Framework today, sbt is the way to go.

Like you say, Activator delegates a lot of its logic to sbt. Activator is mainly designed to help people who want to get started with new projects. This means it has some better error messages than sbt for new users. It also provides two commands to help new users:

• activator new - Create a new project from a template. This will also automatically download the latest list of templates.
• activator ui - Launch a web browser UI for creating and running projects. This makes it a bit easier for new users to get started with coding and running a project. The UI also has tutorial functionality, so template writers can explain their templates to new users.

Since I'm an experienced user, I mostly use sbt instead of Activator. I'll tend to only use Activator for creating new projects. That doesn't mean that Activator isn't a useful product, it's just that I'm already comfortable using sbt.

There's some more info here: https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Highlights23