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Lower costs and advancement of the technology has made laser cutting more accessible than ever before. Powering countless home businesses, laser cutting technology is a gateway to monetizable crafts for both first-timers and experienced makers alike.
When you’re in the market for a laser cutter, it can be tricky to tell exactly what you need and how much you should spend – especially if you’re new to the tech. You can spend as little as a couple hundred dollars on a crafty diode laser cutter, or several thousands of dollars on one of an ocean of similar CO2 machines; all with familiar specs but marginal differences in their operation, software, and standard equipment.
It’s a pricey path to lock into, so we understand you’ll want to be confident when pulling that potentially expensive trigger. We’ve exhaustively researched the market and spent some time in the lab to pull together three machines that we consider to be strong prospects.
The Best Laser Cutters
How to Choose a Laser Cutter
There are, of course, plenty of laser cutters out there to choose from with different price points, strengths, capabilities, and styles. We try to focus on the machines that can still be easily installed in a home, office, or small workshop. Laser cutters can get very big and very heavy very quickly.
Picking the correct machine to suit your hobby or business is crucial. There are only really two types of laser to be found on consumer-grade desktop machines (the focus of this guide) – diode and CO2. The best advice we’ve picked up in all our dealings with laser engravers and cutters: get the biggest, most powerful machine you can afford. They are big and expensive, and a conservative purchase in this space is a fast track to buyer’s remorse.
Diode laser-based systems are typically much weaker than their CO2 counterparts, using a laser in the visible light spectrum. They do not penetrate materials as deep as CO2 lasers can and don’t perform as well with bright or transparent materials. On the other hand, they offer the advantages of being more affordable and easier to maintain and transport. If you only plan to cut paper, cardboard, fabrics, and that sort of thing, or mainly surface engravings, then a diode laser may be suitable.
CO2 lasers are far more powerful than diode lasers, though not always with such a big step up in price.
The technology involved often means that CO2 laser cutters are large and heavy; you’ll need space and someone to help you install one safely. They also require cooling systems for the CO2 tube necessary for the generation of the laser beam, which adds an extra layer of maintenance to the overall operation of one. Heavy-duty CO2 laser cutters sometimes even use dedicated chillers for their water cooling systems. They run hot.
It’s important to note that the CO2 tube in these laser cutters is a consumable and will eventually need replacement. Glass tubes are cheaper (but still cost hundreds) and offer all-round performance at the expense of a shorter life than RF CO2 lasers, which are pricier, but longer lasting.
A good laser cutter will be a machine that can produce consistently accurate and high-quality cuts across a variety of materials. The feature set should be broad with a strong focus on job setup and safety – laser cutters can be dangerous power tools and shouldn’t be taken lightly. For one, ensure your laser cutter has the appropriate ventilation. The cutting process involves vaporizing material and consequently generates smoke and even dangerous gasses that must be dealt with for safe operation. Some laser cutters integrate smoke filtration units or offer them separately.
Air assist is another safety and quality system. Designed to blast debris clear of the material, they reduce the risk of fire and ensure a clear path for the cut. Emergency shutoffs are commonplace and essential, as are door-open shutoffs. Unless you have a dedicated ventilation system to handle the smoke, then all of the above should be the minimum to aim for in a good laser cutter.
Lastly, there’s software. Good software is key to the user experience of these machines. Without it, they can be difficult to get to grips with. LightBurn is a great third-party option that’s compatible with many laser engravers and cutters. Fortunately, some of the provided software and browser-based apps are good enough for quick laser-cutting work, particularly for users without the time to learn professional-grade software. All of this is to say that some systems are more turnkey than others for beginners.
Top Pick
The Best Laser Cutters
Top Pick: OMTech Polar
If there’s one thing analyzing the laser cutters on the market has taught us, it’s that there’s really only a small handful of machine styles and sizes in the consumer/prosumer space. One machine with brothers and sisters throughout the laserspace is the Polar from OMTech. Strip off the badge and stick it in a lineup with the Gweike Cloud and Monport Onyx (we’re sure there are others), and you’d be hard-pushed to separate them.
But separate them, you can, with the OMTech Polar, slimly coming out on top through its software flexibility.
Available for ~$3000, the OMTech Polar nets you a 50W CO2 laser with a 510 x 300 mm work area, theoretically expanding to 510 x infinity thanks to the machine’s 7 mm deep pass-through slot. Cutting performance will vary for any laser cutter depending on the material and speed you’re cutting at; OMTech claims a maximum processing speed of 500 mm/s for the Polar.
Helpfully, there’s a readout of the amperage the machine’s laser is outputting when in use, which you can use to figure out the machine’s limits and adjust your cutting strategy accordingly so as not to overwork the laser and shorten its lifespan.
The Polar boasts plenty of other useful features, including rotary adapters for cylindrical work right out of the box.
Set up is pleasantly straightforward, and an inline air fan is provided to draw smoke from the chamber and vent it through the (also provided) 2 meters of duct. The Polar offers a near-turnkey setup on the hardware side, with full compatibility with professional software Lightburn. Overall, there’s the potential for a competent cutting solution underpinned by solid hardware and top-grade software.
OMTech Polar
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Budget Pick
The Best Laser Cutters
Budget Pick: OMTech K40+ (DF0812-40BN)
Many folks’ first laser cutter and, to this day, a popular design, the K40 is a stalwart of a laser cutter that’s cheap and plentiful, with dozens of no-name variants available on cut-price stores online. Besides the price, the main benefit of a K40-style laser cutter is its upgradeability, with virtually all core components affordably swappable.
OMTech’s K40+ (which also carries the graceful name DF0812-40 – blech) evolves the base offering some, with a Lightburn-compatible controller as standard (often an upgrade for other K40-style machines). It retains the compact form of a typical K40, with a rather tight cutting area of 300 x 200 mm. The cutting power and speed leave a little to be desired, too, with the K40+’s 40W CO2 tube paling against the beefier beams offered by our other picks. Being realistic, though, it’s a budget option; that’s the compromise you make. It costs less than a quarter of our top pick and comfortably gives you more than a quarter of that machine’s performance.
There are a couple of helpful reasons to opt for the K40+ over a powerful diode laser (and at this price point, who could blame you for thinking it?). Firstly, there’s the dual work bed, which on one side offers a flat surface to support intricate cuts that carve your workpiece into smaller pieces. On the other, there’s a clampable surface for securing your material against movements mid-job. Then, there’s a general uptick in power, accuracy, and variety of materials that can be cut.
The OMTech K40+ is enclosed by design, with an emergency shutoff just a hand-slam distance away from the front of the machine. Next to this is a safety key system and an ammeter readout for you to see the laser’s output at a given time. This is useful for determining the tube’s maximum operation amperage and ensuring you don’t over-crank the power in your job set-up. This would result in either overreaching the full cutting potential, diminishing performance or putting the system under excessive wear and shortening the lifespan of the CO2 tube.
Ah, yes, that’s the not-so-apparent thing with CO2 lasers. It may not quite be the case that a CO2 laser that burns twice as brightly lives half as long, but, well, you get the idea that they have a limited operational life. You will need to replace the tube after hundreds or thousands of hours of use. Your mileage may vary.
In a nutshell, the K40+ is a cheap, compact, and capable laser cutter, compatible with what’s widely considered the process’ top-tier software, and wholly self-serviceable. The effort required is greater than the vast number of plug-and-play systems offered by the likes of Glowforge or xTool, but it’s virtually pennies to the dollar.
OMTech K40+
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Upgrade Pick
The Best Laser Cutters
Upgrade Pick: xTool P2
It was tricky to nail down an upgrade system to recommend. Our research tells us that, in laser cutting, bigger and more powerful is better, and so putting together a guide of machines that exist within the desktop, at a stretch, benchtop spectrum of possibility doesn’t leave many options.
Fortunately, the xTool P2 makes the job easy with just how mind-bogglingly expandable it is. At its core, the P2 is a 600 x 305 mm work area CO2 laser cutter with an automatic passthrough for projects ten times the length its 305 mm Y-axis depth conventionally allows. This is, in itself, not unique. However, there are conveyor add-ons that expand the P2’s ability to handle oversized materials securely, reducing the effort on your part and generally setting the system up as a much larger system than its already expansive footprint suggests.
A dual camera system is present, with a static wide-angle snapper giving you the full work area in preview and a precision laser-head-mounted second camera providing ad-hoc “precision” previews to help take the guesswork out of job alignment.
In our experience using the machine, the wide-angle preview is not especially helpful, particularly at the extremes of the work area (wide-angle lens – it makes sense that it wouldn’t), and so for jobs that require edge-to-edge alignment, extra care is needed in the preparation.
As said, the P2 is expandable with an ecosystem of add-ons to enhance your quality of life using it and expand its functionality. A smoke filtration unit makes it bearable to use without direct outside ventilation (though we’d still recommend it where possible), and a riser to expand the volume for larger laser targets in the Z-axis, plus the aforementioned passthrough conveyor all contribute to the feeling of a cohesively tailored experience.
It’s only part compatible with Lightburn, which is one caveat that almost stayed our hand in making this recommendation, but between its general functionality there (you miss the camera and Wi-Fi control, which is annoying but not deal-breaking) and the provided xTool Creative Studio with its odd but valuable features like intelligent batching letting you roll out an engrave/score/cut to an entire work area of misaligned copies with precision – the software side of working with the P2 is well catered to.
These thoughtful touches, on top of a highly capable core experience, plus the size and power, make the P2 a solid machine to take over the others.
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Other Machines
A handful of companies stand out with convenient desktop laser cutters that don’t break the bank. Relatively speaking, that is. You could, if you wanted, spend tens of thousands on an industrial-grade machine.
Keen-eyed readers may notice the similarity between the OMTech Polar and the Gweike Cloud. On paper, they’re very similar laser cutters, both with 50W output and 510 x 300 mm work areas. There are Cloud RF and a larger Cloud Pro variants, but our research suggests that Gweike’s machines are not quite as compatible with Lightburn as the Polar, which even ships with a copy of the software. Largely, though, you’re experiencing the same power, work area, and hardware design for roughly the same money.
This wouldn’t be much of a laser cutter guide without mentioning Glowforge and its products. They’re not as powerful as newer CO2 laser cutters, but Glowforge’s thing has always been turnkey simplicity – something the Glowforge Plus and Glowforge Pro have by the spadeful with easy-to-use software and a subscription plan that gives greater access to resources and inspiration for users looking to make a quick project. Such simplicity comes at a cost, though, with price tags north of everything we recommend above. They also require an internet connection to utilize Glowforge’s cloud-based processing for jobs, which is a limitation for some.
An alternate ecosystem of laser cutters can be found in the Flux Beamo, Beambox, and Hexa, which covers the spectrum of work areas, starting with the Beamo’s 300 x 210 mm (they do market it as the “world’s smallest CO2 laser cutter”) all the way up to the Hexa’s gargantuan 730 x 410 mm. A company of extremes, truly. In the act of cutting, Flux’s machines offer a pleasant enough simplicity, with its own Beam Studio software and app providing the means for you to set up your work. There’s a flat zero compatibility with Lightburn for any of Flux’s machines. However, Beam Studio can interpret layers by colors, preserving one of the reasons you might use Lightburn in the first place.
Laser Cutting Guide
Want to learn more about laser cutters before you decide to invest in one? Keep reading through our guide to laser cutters to find out everything there is to know about laser cutting technology.
The Best Laser Cutters
How Does a Laser Cutter Work?
Laser cutters work by generating and then channeling a powerful and highly focused laser beam through a material in order to cut it. How the laser is generated depends on the technology deployed by the machine in question, but the laser is deflected off the surface of a mirror and then passed through a lens to focus it before it hits the material in the workspace.
Once the laser is in contact with the material, it will burn, melt or even vaporize material away. Once it has broken through the material, it will begin to cut it following either CNC or G-code that tells it how to move. Following the vector file that holds the 2D design, the laser beam cuts away at a material until the image is completed.
Incredibly precise and detailed work is achievable with a laser cutter and there’s a wide range of applications and materials the machines can work with, such as wood, cardboard, leather, acrylic, and even some metals.
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The Best Laser Cutters
Laser Cutter Types
There are a few varieties of laser cutters out there but, for the purposes of this buyer’s guide, we’ll focus on the three most common ones – CO2, fiber, and diode.
CO2
A CO2 laser is the most common type to feature in our buyer’s guide, and that’s for good reason. It’s the most affordable way to get into laser cutting at high enough wattages to be dependable for a variety of materials, with prices beginning at around $500 for a CO2 laser cutter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a CO2 laser is generated by sending an electrical current through a glass tube filled with CO2 and other gases. As the electricity flowing through the tube aggravates the gases, it causes them to produce light. The light bounces around some cleverly placed mirrors at the end of the airtight glass tube before being focused by a lens and exiting the device, hitting the surface of the material you’re working with.
CO2 lasers have upsides and downsides. Positives include a smooth cutting finish and a relatively quick straight-line speed (compared to other forms of laser), but they are also pretty sensitive machines. With their combination of mirrors and glass tubing, they are quite fragile and need aligning perfectly to function at their best. This results in more expensive upkeep and servicing costs in terms of both time and money. Still, this is balanced by their initial affordability.
Fiber
Fiber lasers are a newer technology in the laser cutting world. On an industrial level, they’re often deployed to cut thin sheets of metal for production components. In desktop form, they’re fairly rare and very expensive machines but do have a number of benefits.
For a start, they’re far more electrically efficient than CO2 lasers, meaning they cost less to run in terms of power. They’re also cheaper to maintain, as they have fewer moving parts and are generally of a more stable construction, making them less vulnerable to damage in transport.
In a fiber laser, the laser itself is generated from an optical fiber that has had rare-earth elements (such as erbium, ytterbium, or neodymium) added to it. Lasers produced in this method are said to be very stable and easier to focus.
Although fiber lasers are expensive initially, they are far more efficient and stable than their CO2 counterparts, and the servicing and maintenance costs are also said to be dramatically lower. Unfortunately, the price of the technology itself tends to make fiber lasers very difficult to obtain, meaning fiber lasers are few and far between in All3DP’s buyer’s guides.
Diode
Diode lasers are by far the cheapest laser cutting technology, but they’ve only recently entered into that category in a meaningful way. Previously, diode lasers were relegated to a simple DIYers engraving tool, given their much lower power compared to other technologies on this list. They’re typically available in 5, 10, and, more recently, 20 watts, finally finding more use in cutting as they’ve reached these higher wattages and become generally more efficient.
To create their beams, diode lasers use a semiconductor diode, sort of like the diodes in LEDs, to generate a highly directional light that is projected into a lens. This lens has two reflective surfaces that bounce the light back and forth until it reaches laser oscillation and passes through the less reflective forward-facing lens surface as a beam.
While diode lasers are far more limited than other laser technologies in terms of raw power they are quite affordable, making them extremely popular engraving and cutting machines among makers. If you’re not picky about working with softer materials, you can save quite a bit by opting for this technology.
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The Best Laser Cutters
Materials for Laser Cutting
Laser cutters can be used with multiple materials. Most commonly, you’ll find them being used with wood, leather, soft metals, acrylic, and cardboard. Some of these materials are easier to work with than others, and each will require its own approach and methods to achieve the best results. It’s important to research what material you want to cut before buying your machine, as well as the appropriate methods for cutting as some machines won’t work with all materials.
It goes without saying, but stronger, more powerful, and more technologically advanced lasers can work with stronger and more difficult materials. For most machines in this list, the materials mentioned above are what you’ll be able to cut. Be aware that cutting metal of any description is a challenging task for many consumer machines. On the other hand, cutting cardboard and paper won’t be too difficult even for some of the weaker lasers listed in our Laser Engravers Buyer’s Guide.
For optimized cutting and safety, most laser cutters will need an exhaust system to channel out toxic fumes and particles. Speaking of toxic fumes, some materials are simply too dangerous to cut with lasers. Vinyl is one of them. Laser-cutting vinyl triggers a chemical process that generates chlorine gas (historically used as a chemical weapon) as well as hydrochloric acid, which can rot the metal of your machine.
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The Best Laser Cutters
What is a Laser Cutter Used for?
Laser cutters are famed for their precision and ability to assist in a wide variety of tasks. Away from the workshops of hobbyists, lasers are used in all kinds of industries, from medical to automotive.
Back in the workshop, laser cutters featured in this buyer’s guide are often used to cut (and engrave) wood, leather, cardboard, and more for crafted goods like wallets, jewelry, lighting fixtures, and signage. It’s not uncommon for crafters, such as the sellers you’ll find on sites like Etsy, to utilize machines like this to produce items with added personalization and uniqueness.
There are plenty of opportunities for creativity with these machines and, though this buyer’s guide focuses on the cutting aspect, the machines mentioned are usually very capable of engraving and marking too.
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The Best Laser Cutters
Laser Cutter Software
Laser cutting software comes in two different flavors – design and control. Design software is the tool in which you design what it is you actually want to laser cut. Control software handles the machine and the commands it needs to get on with the job.
With some machines, the software will be provided for you. This is the case with Full Spectrum Laser, which provides a piece of browser-based control software called RetinaEngrave v3.0 with its machine. This software was developed by the company itself, so it ought to work pretty flawlessly with its own machines.
Some machines will require you to source (and pay for) your own laser software. You do have the option of using free ones, such as the popular LaserGRBL control software, but many users believe that paying for quality software is crucial in obtaining good results from your laser cutter. It’s a cost to factor into your purchasing budget.
When it comes to design software, cited favorites include Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, and Affinity Designer. LightBurn, meanwhile, is a control software for your laser cutter considered to be a worthwhile upgrade from free software such as LaserGRBL. Further information on software for laser engraving and cutting can be found in this guide.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a free professional-grade piece of design software. It’s been developed by a large team of people and is open source. This powerful vector graphics editor can be used to create all kinds of designs and images and has a superb reputation among community members who use it. A number of user-created extensions add to its abilities, and it’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems.
With an extension, Inkscape can be used to create files for laser cutting by exporting a 2D G-code file.
Adobe Illustrator
Another famous piece of design software, Adobe Illustrator will cost you a cent under $21 a month for a license.
Considered to be one of the best programs in the world for design and illustration, Adobe Illustrator has a number of cool and helpful features for laser cutting. One such feature is named Artboards, which lets you lay out your designs onto a piece of digital material to see how it fits. Particularly useful if your laser cutter isn’t too sophisticated.
Affinity Designer
Another well-regarded piece of paid design software, Affinity Designer, is for Mac and Windows and has also been optimized to run on iPad, according to its maker. Marketed as a “stripped back, pro-end workhorse,” Affinity Designer is a perfectly viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator that features separate workspaces for vector and raster.
LightBurn
In terms of control software, LightBurn has a great reputation among the maker community and is often the first port of call for those upgrading from free software. Costing $40, it isn’t a huge expense for the benefits that it brings: namely the number of options and flexibility with regard to laser settings, as well as design and layout. LightBurn is, for many, a must-have when it comes to laser cutting or engraving.
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What's Changed?
This article used to be updated quarterly, meaning our recommendations could be anywhere up to three months out of date. That’s not so useful for buying advice, so we’ve binned that schedule and moved to a rolling update cycle. The moment we discover a laser cutter that deserves to be known, it goes on this list.
Update – December XX, 2023: We’ve retired the compact Flux Beamo as our top pick, with the feature-rich OMTech Polar taking its place. Likewise, for large, potentially limitless cutting with solid software features, the xTool P2 steps in as our new upgrade recommendation.
Update – February 6, 2023: We’ve overhauled this guide to focus in greater detail on the three main machines we feel people should consider when opting for a laser cutter. As usual, prices have been checked and updated where necessary.
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