Best Budget 3D Printers of 2024 - CNET

Article updated on October 23, 2024 at 5:33 AM PDT

If you're looking to start 3D printing without spending a hefty amount, these are the best budget options to get started.

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.

Whether you're brand new to 3D printing or have been wanting to invest in your own printer for a while, these machines are not as expensive as you might think. Whether you want to prioritize print speed or large print volume, it's definitely possible to get excellent print quality from a 3D printer at an affordable price. Let's take a peek at the printing process for the best budget 3D printer for you.

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What can you build with a 3D printer? Small statues to give as gifts and epic pieces of costume armor just scratch the surface. The possibilities are practically limitless. You can even tap into your creative side by opening an Etsy store. Equipping yourself with a few printers will get you on your way to turning your hobby into a revenue stream.

The best budget 3D printers will offer a healthy balance between usability and cost, allowing you to explore hobbies or kickstart a business at a certain level. Check out our top picks to find the best budget 3D printer for your project needs.

Budget 3D printing is a category that is growing fast. For your money, the best you can buy is the Anycubic Kobra 2 (it is currently out of stock so keep checking back). The affordable printer has enough upgraded features to make it an incredibly useful machine. Its price was recently slashed to $199 from its previously firm-set price range of $250-$280. Having such excellent print quality in a budget printer makes it an ideal choice.

These budget 3D printers all cost under $500 (although prices can drift a bit from month to month), and some are better suited for beginners than others. Our list of picks for the best 3D printer overall covers a much wider range of choices, but these are excellent for getting started -- or for buying several at once. If you are thinking of creating a print farm, then buying several Anycubic Kobra 2s is an excellent way to get started.

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.

Anker did way more than take its excellent M5 printer and remove a few things to create a budget-friendly model. In fact, there are a couple of ways in which this budget bed-slinger improved over the original. The slightly smaller build platter offers guard rails so it's much easier to get it on and off the heated base. The camera and display have been removed, but the AnkerMake app is one of the best pieces of software available for any 3D printer and has a much nicer interface. Perhaps best of all, the new all-metal hot-end means it can handle a larger array of materials when printing. At its core, it's still a rock-solid printer with some of the most user-friendly apps you can get today.

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.

While not as fast as the P1P or the X1C from the best 3d printer list, the Kobra 2 is around the same maximum speed as the AnkerMake M5. It will happily produce prints at 250 millimeters per second, although the best output quality seems to be hovering around 150mm/s in my testing. It also comes with a filament runout sensor and bed leveling, which works extremely well.

As the best budget 3D printer, the big selling point for the Kobra 2 is the price. It has all the advantages of a faster printer but with a sub-$300 price tag, which is astonishing. This is my recommendation for any first-time buyer or someone on a budget.

Most beginner printers use a plastic filament to create models, but plenty of affordable resin 3D printers are available, too. Liquid resin is a little more difficult to use than standard 3D printing material and requires safety equipment, but it also produces amazingly detailed results.

This small resin printer is Elegoo's latest model in its popular Mars line. Because of the 4K monochrome LCD (these printers use light from an LCD to cure liquid resin), it can print much faster than older printers. Standard 3D printing simply can't reproduce the level of detail on models. At this price, the Elegoo Mars 3 is the best resin printer for the money.

The Elegoo is one of my favorite ultracheap printers. When testing it, I kept expecting it to fail, and it just didn't. It produced amazing results for the price and continues to do so every time I use it. Whether you buy the Anycubic Kobra 2 or the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro, you are getting the best budget 3D printer for under $300.

The Elegoo Saturn 2 is my favorite resin printer right now. Its high-speed printing doesn't sacrifice print quality. The bed size is much larger than the printers in the smaller category, while its footprint is much easier to deal with than other, larger printers. You can print finely detailed cosplay pieces or multiple tabletop miniatures with equal ease with the Saturn 2, making it perfect for a small business. Read more: Elegoo Saturn 2 Review

Most home 3D printers use PLA or ABS plastic. Professional printers can use all sorts of materials, from metal to organic filament. Some printers use a liquid resin, which is much more difficult to handle but offers sharper details. As a beginner, use PLA. It's nontoxic, made mostly of cornstarch and sugarcane, handles easily and is inexpensive. It's also more sensitive to heat, so don't leave your 3D prints on the dashboard of a car on a hot day.

Most 3D printers include or link to recommended software, which can handle converting 3D STL or other files into formats supported by the printer. Stick with the suggested presets to start -- with one exception. I've started adding a raft, or bottom layer of filament, to nearly everything I print. It has cut down dramatically on prints that don't adhere to the bed properly, which is a common issue. If you continue to have problems, rub a standard glue stick on the print bed right before printing.

Your 3D models probably need some help to print properly, as these printers don't do well with big overhangs -- for example, an arm sticking out from a figure. Your 3D printer software can usually automatically calculate and add supports, meaning little stands that hold up all those sticking-out parts of the model. After the print is done, clip the supports off with micro cutters and file down any nubs or rough edges with hobby files.

Testing 3D printers is an in-depth process. Printers often don't use the same materials, or even the same process to create models. I test SLA 3D printers that use resin and light to print, and FDM printers that melt plastic onto a plate. Each has a unique methodology. Core qualifiers I look at include:

A key test print, representing the (now old) CNET logo, is used to assess how a printer bridges gaps, creates accurate shapes and deals with overhangs. It even has little towers to help measure how well the 3D printer deals with temperature ranges.

When testing print speed, we slice the model using the standard slicer the machine is shipped with on its standard settings, then compare the real-world duration of the print to the statement completion time on the slicer. 3D printers often use different slicers, and those slicers can vary wildly on what they believe the completion time to be.

We then use PrusaSlicer to determine how much material the print should use and divide that number by the real-world time it took to print to give us a more accurate number for the speed in millimeters per second (mm/s) the printer can run at.

Every build plate is supposed to heat up to a certain temperature so we use the InfiRay thermal imaging camera for Android to check how well they do. We set the build plate to 60 degrees Celsius -- the most used temperature for build plates -- waited 5 minutes for the temperature to stabilize, and then measured it in six separate locations. We then took the average temperature to see how close the 3D printer got to the advertised temperature.

Testing resin printers requires different criteria, so I use the Ameralabs standard test: printing out a small resin model that looks like a tiny town. This helps determine how accurate the printer is, how it deals with small parts and how well the UV exposure works at different points in the model.

Many other anecdotal test prints, using different 3D models, are also run on each printer to test the longevity of the parts and how well the machine copes with various shapes.

For the other criteria, I researched the company to see how well it responds to support queries from customers and how easy it is to order replacement parts and install them yourself. Kits (printers that come only semi-assembled) are judged by how long and difficult the assembly process is and how clear the instructions are.