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?
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.
I’m pretty sure Voron is fully open source.
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.
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.