I feel conflicted. On the one hand, Prusa seems to be a good and reliable brand. On the other hand, it seems overpriced compared to the competitors. Bambu seems to be a no-go but mostly for ethical open source reasons, not for price or quality reasons. At the same time, I’ve seen this article that says Prusa is even falling back on their open source principles. But not sure how up to date that is any more.
If we look beyond Bambu or Prusa, there’s a variety of smaller brands that I have trouble distinguishing. With these other brands, it’s hard to tell whether they’re worth anything or just cheap knockoffs.
If we do consider Prusa, there’s also the question of MK4S vs Core One. The Core One is much more expensive, to the point where it is ridiculously expensive compared to the competitors. The MK4S is slightly cheaper, but it seems like Prusa is focused on the Core One development going forward, so I’d be slightly worried of being “left behind” with the MK4S.
What do you think? Which printer should you get in 2026? Or perhaps there is some upcoming release or something to wait for?
I have a Prusa Core One and it’s great. Passed on Bambu when I ordered this about 6 months ago because of their behavior. Glad I did.
I own a mk4. Bought it in 2023 and still works perfectly. Buy prusa, it works and its kind of like the framework of 3d printers.
I don’t know current best options, but last I was looking, the Voron design was where I was leaning. I’d suggest avoiding companies that violate open source licenses.
I used to be a Prusa evangelist, but I don’t forgive them for the MMU2S. Huge amount of people never could get it to work. I’m curious as to the actual percentage working. I couldn’t ever get it to work even with multiple complete rebuilds. That product should have been recalled or a free fix offered. Years later they released a new version that supposedly fixed the issues and you still had to pay to upgrade to it. Discounted if they had a support record for you. If not, full price.
From time to time I see a new Prusa printer and think “that looks good, I should buy it”, and then remember the insane amount of time I wasted trying to get the MMU2S to work. Never buying Prusa again until they provide me the working MMU I paid for at no additional cost. As there’s basically zero chance of that, my boycott continues and I suggest not supporting a company that fucked over their customers with an expensive poorly designed product that they then want them to pay to fix.
From what I can read, Voron is more like the printer itself becomes the hobby, rather than actually printing stuff. I’m not really interested in tinkering with the printer itself, I just want it to work.
I’m guessing the cheap, good quality, printers are cheap because they want to capture market share and enshitify (all the proprietary stuff they use is a hint).
I was looking for something to replace my old Creality CR10S a few months ago, Bambu and Qidi were tempting because of the price, but I didn’t like how proprietary everything was. The Prusa Core One looked nice, but looks like they’re going a little less “free” now with their Open Community License and locked boot loaders. I would have got a Troodon (Voron-derived pre-built printer), but they were out of stock. I settled on just getting a Formbot Voron kit. Took a very long time to build, but I’m very happy with it. I know the printer inside and out, so it’s easy to debug, modify, or repair if I need to.
In my opinion, if you’re already somewhat familiar with 3d printing, I’d build a Voron from a kit. If not, I’d get a Voron-derived pre-built like a Troodon or Sovol SV8 (I think the Sovol has a proprietary toolhead though). If you want an easy Apple-like experience, but still pretty “open,” I’d get a Prusa.
If you think you’re going to want to print higher-temp, warp-prone filaments like ABS/ASA/PA, I would not choose a bed-slinger (e.g. Mk4s), because they are harder to enclose nicely and take up a lot of space if enclosed. As one data-point, my core-xy Voron produces much higher quality prints (e.g. less artifacts) and is faster than my bedslinger CR10S.
Prusa walked so other manufacturers could run. 15 years ago prusa were the ones who made 3d printing a viable hobby for the rest of us. And all this while keeping their designs and code open source.
Today I view the extra I pay today for their products as a well deserved reward for their integrity.
That mindset is part of why I bought a Prusa originally, but felt betrayed by the MMU2S. That was an expensive and crap product that they never fixed. They basically stole from their customers with that one and I wish the community wouldn’t let them get away with it without them making it right, which at this point would be difficult to do.
Also I feel confident Prusa will not try a rug-pull enshitification move in 6 months time after buying their printer, unlike certain other manufacturers (Bamboo)
Bambu also is a no-go for quality reasons by now, they didn’t care for their printers catching fire for way too long.
That article, while technically being correct on many things, is also a little bit hyperbolic (that picture with “Who’s copying who now” is just laughable at best and utterly misleading). Prusa is still the best choice in what we call this “open market” (which repeatedly fucked them over), including openness.
Viable alternatives, including cheaper ones, would be Snapmaker’s U1 and printers from Qidi Tech or Sovol. Mind that Qidi Tech and Sovol are somewhat known for sub-par customer support (they have to save the money somewhere I guess). Qidi Tech is better for “set up and use”, Sovol is a good baseline to tinker with the printer itself as well.
Keep in mind that Prusa printers absolutely excel in longevity though, and they’re the only ones known to offer upgrade paths. Not to mention data security when using their services… just saying there are good reasons their printers are more expensive. You’ll most likely have more from them for longer. Not the MK4S though, that one is very much last gen by now.
+1 prusa, I’m ob my mk3s+ for 7 years now, after moving twice, banger around, still prints like new. I was thinking of reapplying lube, didn’t need it.
I can second the Snapmaker U1. Amazing machine, rock solid, works every time. I run it in LAN mode with custom firmware. If I need to remote in, I use a VPN on my local pi. No direct internet access/cloud stuff needed for the U1.
Look into a Snapmaker U1. Multi toolhead under a grand by a company that is very open source friendly.
If I could afford it, that would be my choice.
I’d probably get the Creality Sparx i7 right now, as an entry-level multicolour 3D printer. I got the Creality Hi Combo last year, and it’s been a great printer for me, and it sounds like the Sparx i7 is mostly just better.
I bought a Prusa MK1 kit back in 2014. It was the right choice at the time. 3D-printing was finickier and you had to know your machine inside out. It’s since been upgraded to mk2.5.
It’s starting to be worn out - bearing are giving up, belts are tied, cables are experiencing metal fatigue. I bought a flashforge ad5x for Christmas. It’s just a lot of printer for the money. The ceramic heater broke, but I got a new on warranty. It’s been quite reliable, and a lot faster than ye olde bedslinger.
Looks like flashforge might be pulling some shenanigans with the firmware, but there is opensource mods to save the day.
I’ve owned an MK3S+ and now a Core One+, I don’t regret the money that I spent on either.
It’s seriously difficult right now. A while ago I would have clearly recommended Bambu, especially the A1/A1 mini. Super cheap, perfect prints every time. But their current behaviour makes them unrecommendable.
If you are going for a higher budget printer, I can recommend the Snapmaker U1. That’s a beautiful device. I got myself that one, and it’s purely amazing. Custom firmware is available, which fixes some problems in the stock firmware. Perfect 4-color prints every time with very low waste.
The filament changer is even quite useful for single-filament prints, because you can just keep multiple filaments loaded and don’t have to manually swap filaments.
Snapmaker U1 looks really good, but then again it is another Chinese brand in the sea of other chinese brands. But multi-color printing included in the price… It’s a really good deal.
Snapmaker seems to be Bambu from a few years ago, promises, good hardware, but all proprietary and as locked down as possible hatdware-wise. I am fairly confident they will follow a similar path even though they have made some software source - available.
I don’t think so. Or to put it differently: there is no fully open-source 3D printer any more.
The only relevant parts of the Snapmaker U1 that actually seem to be proprietary are the hotends/extruders. These are also proprietary for newer Prusa or E3D stuff.
And compared to some of the newer Prusa printers, you don’t have to physically snap off part of the mainboard to flash custom firmware onto the U1. Snapmaker doesn’t even void your warranty for using custom firmware, as long as the firmware doesn’t damage the hardware and you manage to back-flash stock firmware.
I mean, any company can turn from FOSH to proprietary, same as E3D and Prusa, even though both of them were real FOSH champions. The issue is that if you do FOSH, you are essentially developing for your competitors.
E3D spent years of development to come up with great nozzles, Hotends and so on, and they have to factor that into their product prices. So when it comes to the customers buying parts, they have the choice between an €70 one from E3D or an €6 one from Aliexpress. Or anything in between, often quality products from name-brand seller for a fraction of the price of a real E3D one.
In the end, E3D ends up unable to compete in the market they created. That’s unsustainable.
In general, open source works well for stuff that isn’t the main product. Angular works well as open source because Google doesn’t have a way to sell it. Google monetizes their web apps built with Angular, so they have an incentive to maintain and improve Angular, but they can’t monetize it directly, so open sourcing it helps get more eyes on the code, so that others can find bugs and vulnerabilities from them.
Open source works good as a marketing device for non-essential parts. People do buy e.g. open printers because that means they won’t get vendor lock-in and people can create custom firmware to fix issues, add improvements and support the product after the company stopped first-party support.
But it’s sadly unsustainable if you are just handing the plans to the competition, asking them to please undercut and replace you.
And yes, as a FOSH and FOSS developer myself, this hurts. But so far there hasn’t been an actual solution for the issue.
there is no fully open-source 3D printer any more.
I’m pretty sure Voron is fully open source.
but all proprietary and as locked down as possible hatdware-wise.
There’s no DRM in the hardware. It isn’t locked down at all. There are 3rd party hotends already. Not even Prusa has open source hardware now.
I am fairly confident they will follow a similar path even though they have made some software source - available.
They have released all firmware source code. So it doesn’t matter what they do in the future. You have control over your hardware for forever.
What custom firmware are you running on your U1?
I love my Qidi XMax 3. I’ve basically only needed to change my z offset a handful of times and it just slams out prints. It’s got a slightly larger build volume and runs Klipper out of the box.
Could be an option worth considering if you’re looking for a printer that you can set up and run and don’t need anything particularly fancy that just kinda goes.
Wife and I bought a Prusa core one late last year (on sale) as an upgrade to our entry-level cobra neo, which we had rapidly outgrown.
We disqualified Bambu for largely the same reasons you did. We had a look at many different brands, but settled on Prusa because it’s the brand that we can reasonably expect to be supported the longest. Both on the software, but also availability of spare parts.
Many of the shipped parts are 3d printed, and there’s no shortage of spare parts on their own website. I’m fairly certain I will still be able to figure out replacement parts 10 years from now if something breaks, either through Prusa directly or by ordering a printed part from a domestic print-shop.
From my understanding, you have the option of starting with the MK4S (or earlier) and upgrading to the core one later. Not sure I’d recommend it given how long assembly takes, but having this level of repairability and reduction in waste appealed to me: I don’t want to throw out perfectly good hardware.
Prusa wasn’t an easy choice (pricing, open source pull-back), but we felt it was the most reasonable choice since we could afford the premium.
@polakkenak @SorteKanin While you *can* “upgrade” the MK4S to a Core One, it’s more like a complete rebuild with very little parts carryover. It takes a lot of time and doesn’t really make any financial sense.
The MK4S is competent at being what it is, which is an un-enclosed bed slinger. It inherently isn’t going to be as fast as the Core One, it will struggle more with materials that want a stable printing environment, and it’s less suited for printing tall things.
For the time being it uses the same technology the Core One does, though it almost certainly will not support INDX ever. If you really want to do multi-material/color stuff, the MK4S probably isn’t the right choice.
As far as the open source stuff, IMO it’s only a step backwards if one wants to be an absolutist about such things. I’m not here to say whether that is right or wrong, but in practical terms I don’t think there’s much of a difference with the new licensing, if one is not trying to sell knock-off printers.
Prusa is what i would call partly open source these days, the article you link is up to date. But they’re behind the curve at the moment playing catchup with much cheaper printers. This is in part because they insist on their own proprietary firmware instead of working with the massive klipper community which IMO is driving bleeding edge of consumer 3D printing right now, and what almost all their competitors are also using (in some variation).
I wouldn’t call their firmware proprietary, it’s open source and based on marlin.
Perhaps proprietary is not the correct word then, but it is exclusively in-house developed by themselves AFAIK. My point is, they insist on reinventing the wheel every time they want to catch up to their competitors because of this, instead of just working together with the open source community.
I’ve been fairly happy with my Anycuboic Kobra S1. Decent price for performance and fairly easy to use. Fully enclosed, has the capability of multicolor without requiring it, and handles everything we’ve thrown at it with ease.
I’ll never recommend or buy Elegoo again after they provided the single worst customer service experience in my life. A total of three bad mainboards, six months of stalling, lies, and no resolution. If you care about after sale support, avoid them.
@SorteKanin I briefly had MK4S, then Core one. I think MK4S is a decent machine, if you’re mainly printing PLA and PETG. You can even have MK4S enclosed; though with enclosure it’s usually quite chunky. I don’t think there’s any print quality improvement with Core One. Both machines are nice but require a bit of tinkering from time to time (core one belts/homing is a pain, door handle fell off).
(1/n)
