  We study the resources needed to construct topological 2D stabilizer codes as
a way to estimate in part their efficiency and this leads us to perform a
comparative study of surface codes and color codes. This study clarifies the
similarities and differences between these two types of stabilizer codes. We
compute the error correcting rate $C:=n/d^2$ for surface codes $C_s$ and color
codes $C_c$ in several instances. On the torus, typical values are $C_s=2$ and
$C_c=3/2$, but we find that the optimal values are $C_s=1$ and $C_c=9/8$. For
planar codes, a typical value is $C_s=2$, while we find that the optimal values
are $C_s=1$ and $C_c=3/4$. In general, a color code encodes twice as much
logical qubits as a surface code does.
