Best 3D Printer for 2024

No best 3D printer list is complete without the Prusa MK4. Prusa has dominated the market for nearly a decade, and the MK4 continues the trend of excellent quality and customer care while maintaining high standards in open source.

It is fast, although not the fastest, and always creates quality prints. I can count the number of print fails from MK4 on one finger, and I have been using it for months now. If you have the money, the MK4 is well worth the investment.

Read more: Prusa MK4 Review

The P1S is an updated version of our previous best 3D printer winner, the P1P. Each of the machine's updates —plastic side panels, glass top and door, camera, part fan and LED light—makes the P1S our number-one pick for an enclosed machine.
The quality of the models and the speed at which it can print them are amazing, and very few printers can do both of those things at anywhere near the same price.

Anycubic's reputation for dead simple printers to use without being prohibitively expensive scales well to its updated Kobra 2 Max, making any large printing job a mostly set-and-forget affair. The sheer size of this machine requires some consideration.

To maintain speed with the massive build plate, this bed-slinger comes with some powerful motors, which caused even the sturdiest table in my workshop to wobble. The gyroscope in the print head helps combat most of this, but if you're printing something especially tall, be prepared for some imperfections. Like any Anycubic printer, the software is nowhere near as sophisticated as its more expensive competitors. As long as you're right with those minor compromises, you'll get a lot of great prints out of this machine.

While not as fast as the P1P or the X1C, the Kobra 2 is around the same speed as the AnkerMake M5. It will happily produce prints at 250 millimeters per second, though the best quality seems to be hovering around 150mm/s in my testing. It also comes with a filament runout sensor and bed leveling, which works well.

The big selling point for the Kobra 2 is the price. It has all the advantages of a faster printer with a sub-$300 price tag, which is astonishing. This is my recommendation for any first-time buyer or someone on a budget.

One of the first consumer 3D printers to break the 250 millimeter-per-second speed barrier, the AnkerMake M5 has recently had a software update to push its speed up to 500mm/s on its ultrafast mode. The M5 uses an AI camera to help you detect issues so you can stop a failing print before you waste a lot of material. The AI is particularly bad, but the camera does give you some fantastic time-lapse videos to share on social media. 

Read more: AnkerMake M5 Review

The A1 Mini Combo is an almost perfect entry to the world of color 3D printing. It's well-priced, and while the build area is small, the quality of the print -- and the fact you can print in four colors straight out of the box -- is amazing. If you're looking for your first printer and want to try color printing, this is a no-brainer.

Resin printers are the next step up in rapid prototyping design technology when you want your printing to look as high quality as possible. Just be warned: The liquid resin is harder to work with, requiring good ventilation and a portable UV light to properly cure. 

The Photon Mono 2 is Anycubic's latest upgrade to its popular Mono series and is a solid upgrade to the original. The prints are detailed and the printer's size makes it easy to put safely in your workshop. If you want to get into resin printing, the Mono 2 is a great starting point.

The Elegoo Saturn 3 is an almost perfect upgrade from its predecessor. It is bigger and more powerful, with better-quality prints than its predecessor. It's fast too, printing models at what feels like twice the speed as normal. I am able to print an entire plate of D&D minis in less than hour, which is just crazy.

It is my No. 1 choice for a midrange resin 3D printer. If you're looking to print serious details or many tiny models, this is simply the best choice.

The Adventurer 5M and the 5M Pro are two excellent 3D printers from Flashforge. They aren't fancy, and you can see they take heavy influence from the P series from Bambu Lab -- but what they do, they do well, and they do it at an enticing price. A solid CoreXY printer that can print solidly at 300mm/s is not to be sniffed at, and one that's under $300 is well worth your time. I especially like the Flashprint software that allows you to network several printers at the same time effortlessly. Great for schools and small print farms.

Qidi has made a lot of good 3D printers over the years -- one of my first printers was a Qidi machine -- but the Q1 Pro is the first to hit the sweet spot of price and performance in such a meaningful way. It has a bi-metal hot end that allows you to print exotic filaments like carbon fiber and nylons and a heated build chamber to support those exotic filaments. Those unique traits on a sub-$500 make it a great starter choice for engineers.

A word of warning: The CR-30 is not for the beginners out there. It is a complicated machine, and you will need some 3D-printing knowledge to really get the hang of it. It's also a very different beast, and instead of printing on a static-size build plate, it uses a conveyor belt to create an "endless Z-axis." That lets you print extra-long models or lots of things over and over again.

If you are a cosplayer looking to make weapons or large armor pieces, the CR-30 gives you a lot of room to create. I've managed to print Squall's Gunblade from Final Fantasy VIII as well as the Whisper of the Worm from Destiny 2 (both were printed in two halves and attached together). It's great for small businesses looking to mass-produce small parts, and with just two CR-30s you could create a small empire on Etsy or Shopify.