In attempting to crack a sub-$200 printer, Anycubic could have taken the easy route of cheaping out on things and calling it a day. Instead, the company made the Mega Zero, an odd budget 3D printer that makes some deliberate design choices to lower the cost and elevates things elsewhere to accommodate.

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Anycubic Mega Zero Review: Hands On

Take the lack of a heated bed – an easy thing to decry. But, unless you are seriously planning to tackle trickier filaments that warp if you so much as look at them wrong, then a nonheated bed can be a surprisingly versatile thing. PLA can be printed just fine, as can flexible such as TPU, which is something the Mega Zero doubles down on with Anycubic’s approximation of the excellent BMG extruder by Bondtech. Dual geared filament feed with a constrained path to the nozzle gives it some teeth.

If you have absolutely no room to maneuver with your budget and must print for as little as possible, the Mega Zero is a solid place to start. And better still, it gets discounted heavily. We’ve seen it for as little as $109 this Black Friday season, which is mind-bogglingly good value.

The printer to kickstart tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hobbies, Creality’s Ender 3 came at a time when you could spend a lot to have a decent printing experience or pennies, and it be luck of the draw. Cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly good out of the box; all of the things that made it a success when it launched apply today.

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Creality Ender 3 Review: Best 3D Printer Under $200

It comes with a heated print bed that measures 220 x 220 x 250 mm and can resume a print after losing power. Coming mostly pre-assembled, the Ender 3 delivers respectable out-of-the-box results for its price point. Better yet, you can hack, mod, and upgrade the Ender 3 to your heart’s content.

Plus, the popularity of the Ender 3 and its variants mean there’s a huge online community to tap for tips, tricks, and troubleshooting advice, should something go awry with yours.

There’s no question that the stock Ender 3 is a little dated now, but Creality has taken some measures to keep it viable for longer, including swapping out the original 8-bit mainboard for one of the company’s newer, basic 32-bit boards. It won’t be silent out of the box, but has a little more headroom for you to tinker with and carry the firmware forward.

Biqu might just have produced a budget printer capable of knocking Creality’s Ender 3 V2 off its perch. Maybe. It is perhaps not all that surprising that the B1 is basically an Ender 3 clone, but it comes with some delightful pre-installed upgrades that give it a little extra appeal.

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Creality Ender 3 V2 vs Ender 3 (Pro): The Differences

That shouldn’t be all that surprising either, as the company behind Biqu is BigTreeTech, a brand that has built its reputation on developing handy modifications for Creality printers over the last few years. In the B1, you’ll find the SKR 1.4 32-bit mainboard, complete with plug-and-play connection slots for future upgrades such as auto-bed leveling probes and whatnot. It also features a terminal function, that allows you to enter G-code directly on the printer, making changes speaking the language of the machine, if that’s how you get your kicks.

The B1 also has an outstanding touchscreen UI, but allows you to switch between this slick, modern look at the slightly older school Marlin theme controlled using a dial.

With a larger print volume than the Ender 3 V2, superior kit, and a very tempting $250 price tag, the B1 has the potential to be the budget printer of choice. We’ve spent a little time printing with one, and certainly think it has a shot.

Plus, it has user-controllable RGB LED lighting. What’s not to like?

The Creality Ender 3 V2 is not so much an overhaul of the Ender 3s that came before, more a refinement. Taking the uncomplicated design that served the original so well, and sophisticating it with useful additions that make it more workhorse-like and comfortable to use, the Ender 3 V2 continues the series’ characteristic for balancing high-quality printing with, here at $262, a competitive price tag.

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Creality Ender 3 V2 Review: Best 3D Printer Under $300

The build volume remains the same as the Ender 3 before it, at 220 x 220 x 250 mm. Similarly, the Bowden style extruder and ability to print your typical consumer filaments such as PLA, PETG, and, when carefully managed, TPU, remain. New for the Ender 3 V2, however, is the addition of belt tensioners, updated electronics that include a 32-bit board and print-silencing stepper motor drivers, an integrated tool storage drawer, touchscreen UI, and myriad other improvements.

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Creality Ender 3 V2 vs Ender 3 (Pro): The Differences

A fairer comparison between this new Ender and past machines would be the Ender 3 Pro, which the Ender 3 V2 has more in common with, and, at some $30 uptick in price, more than justifies the jump.

Anycubic’s i3 Mega is a reliable 3D printer that’s easy to use and can output excellent prints. For the Mega X, Anycubic kept what worked (basically, everything) and scaled it up up up to three times the size.

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Anycubic Mega X Review: Mega Xperience?

Built like a tank (it’d have to be to accommodate the 300 x 300 x 305 mm build volume), the Mega X benefits from some small changes to improve the overall experience, including dual Z-axis stepper motors and dual-rods to steady the Y-axis carriage. Prints stick well to the large Ultrabase print bed, and a Titan-style extruder underpins the extrusion system’s performance.

For a brand new addition to Anycubic’s Mega line, we would have expected more sweeping changes such as WiFi connectivity and auto bed leveling. Instead, we have a supersized i3 Mega. And that’s just fine because it’s a big-ole workhorse.

Despite the name, Creality’s CR-6 SE is, at its heart, an Ender 3. Just a really, really good one. It is, more or less, the answer to the question “what would a deluxe Ender 3 V2 look like?” The CR-6 SE benefits from flights of fancy in its features, such as a proprietary strain-gauge auto-bed leveling system (that works really well,) live Z-offsetting when printing, custom aluminum extrusions, dual Z-axis motors, a responsive touchscreen display, custom extruder assembly, and a near-skeletal hot end.

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Creality CR-6 SE Review: Flight of Fancy

The stock print quality is rather excellent too, which, combined with the breadth of features, and similar-ish build volume and price, has the CR-6 SE knocking the Ender 5 Pro off this list.

The closest you’ll get to the excellent Original Prusa MK3S without actually buying one (or sourcing and building your own), the Original Prusa Mini is quite different from its larger forebear but the results are largely the same: fantastic print quality, effortless operation, and class-leading features.

The stars of the show are the removable magnetic, PEI-coated print bed, thoroughly developed firmware with a mind-boggling array of hardware-backed features such as mesh-bed leveling. Arguably, the best thing about Original Prusa machines is the continuing support they receive from the company. Regular firmware updates fix bugs, make improvements, and even add all-new features.

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Original Prusa Mini Review: Editor's Choice

The Mini is, undeniably, well, mini, with the build volume maxing out at 180 x 180 x 180 mm. At $422, that’s a big ask considering the average build volumes and general quality of printers that cost less. But then, none of them are a Prusa, are they?

Recently upgraded into the Original Prusa Mini+, which makes minor design changes and improves the auto-bed leveling probe, the new printer remains largely unchanged, meaning the printing performance and user experience will, in all likelihood, be the same (hence our leaving it in this guide.) A $50 price jump might be reason to think twice, but it is still the Prusa experience for roughly half the price of the i3.

Where printers such as Creality’s Ender line require some small amount of assembly, Monprice’s Voxel requires none. This, in combination with its general ease of use and pretty feature-rich offering, makes it an excellent starter printer under $400.

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Monoprice MP Voxel Review: Hands On

A white-label of Flashforge’s Adventurer 3 3D printer, the Voxel’s differences are more than skin deep, with the printing and software experience contributing to an easy-to-use machine with a gentle difficulty curve. The removable bed, print monitoring camera, and WiFi connectivity set it apart from most of the rest on this list, even if the small build volume and rigidity of the slicing software it uses may make the Voxel too inflexible for more ambitious users, but for quick setup and no desire to maintain or manage the printer much, it’s a winner.

The Artillery Sidewinder X1 is a large build volume 3D printer that boasts workhorse-like qualities and reliability printing PLA. Not only that, it has plenty of thoughtful features, including a big one referential to its potential to print big – a Volcano-style hotend.

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Artillery Sidewinder X1 Review: Best in Mid-Range

The X1 has a 300 x 300 x 400 mm build volume, with a direct-drive extruder stacked on top of its Volcano hot end. Allowing for a higher volume of filament to melt and flow at any given time, this hot end should enable you to up the print speed or layer height (with the appropriate nozzle) without having the likelihood of extrusion issues. However, the large glass bed moves in the Y-axis, so your top speed will be limited by all that moving mass.

The X1’s large glass print bed is coated in an Ultrabase-like texture that grips prints when hot and releases them when cold. Tidy ribbon cabling keeps the X1 altogether composed in appearance, although some find them contentious, given the prolonged stress they’re exposed to from the printer’s movements. In testing, we found telltale traces of Z-wobble at the build volume’s upper extremes, but removing the filament spool holder from the top of the frame should improve things a little.

Prusa recently upgraded the MK3S to the MK3S+, which makes minor design changes and improved the mesh bed leveling probe. The core printing performance and experience remain unchanged, which is why the Original Prusa i3 MK3S+ remains our upgrade pick here, too.

As a kit, this benefits from near-unparalleled attention to user experience, with discerning attention to detail making it one of the smartest printers going.

Expect superb print quality, an enthusiastic and helpful community, an easy-to-use slicer software, and a host of other features like auto-calibration, a filament sensor, and crash detection. Diligent software and firmware updates enhance the printer further by squashing bugs, improving existing features, even adding new ones.

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Original Prusa i3 MK3S+ Review: The Best Gets Better

Plus, when you put the machine together yourself, you also get a bag of Haribo gummy bears.

If you shy away from the eight-hour build time, you can spend an additional $250 to get the MK3S+ fully built.

Dipping in under the $1000 mark, the Flashforge Creator Pro 2 deposes the Qidi Tech X-Pro for a place on this list. It’s a printer you can unbox, pop on a table, plug in and start printing with pretty sharpish.

Its headline feature is Independent Dual Extrusion (IDEX) meaning each nozzle has its own direct drive print head that can get about the X-axis all by itself. In practice, this means it can print two models at the same time, mirror print, combine colors and print support structures for some complicated prints with large, unforgiving overhangs.

This technology is usually pretty expensive but you can bag a Creator Pro 2 for $899, which is not bad at all for an IDEX printer. Of course, nothing is perfect, and the Creator Pro 2 has terrible spool holders, a rough print bed and can only be used with the FlashPrint slicer (which isn’t exactly the best). However, you can forgive the printer these drawbacks as it produces some quality prints and is very, very easy to use.

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Flashforge Creator Pro 2 Review: Boxy Little Beauty

Due to that last point, this could be a great printer if you’re just starting off on your additive manufacturing journey and have a bit of extra cash to spend, and the flexibility and capabilities that IDEX gives you opens up a lot of doors. We enjoyed our time with it, and while it’s more expensive than the machine it replaces on this list, we think it’s worth it. A quality upgrade, and near enough as affordable as a good IDEX system gets.