this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I'm happy with my slightly modded Ender 3 Pro, but if I ever upgrade the Snapmaker U1 looks nice. I'll only buy from a company that supports open source firmware. Bambu is trash, unfortunately every 3D printing related YouTuber seems to have happily taken a sponsorship from them so they are everywhere now. I hate it.
Apparently their dual extruder implementation works far better than any other on the market which is a huge deal for printing supports that don't stick. Several of my friends have them and all love the print quality (it's far better than anything I've gotten out of my printers). The pricing is admittedly great too.
I don't have any issues with my i3 so won't be getting one anytime soon, but I absolutely see why people new to 3D printing will go straight to Bambu. It sucks that they actively chose to be bad for the open source community they built their company on top of.
The problem with Bambu is they are not trash at all. Their printers are high-quality, and the way they integrate with their proprietary slicer (that they totally stole from the community before locking it down) and MakerWorld is genuinely excellent.
I have 3 Bambu printers. I don't buy their products anymore (my newest printer is an SV-08 max), but I still use the ones I have and they're excellent, easy machines. And if someone new comes to me wanting a starter "just click print and it works" solution, I'm still likely to point them towards an A1 mini. They're cheap and work great out of the box with zero handholding from me required.
And that's why I kinda hate them. They don't have to be dickheads, but choose to be. Their products are fantastic, and I'd honestly be using Bambu Studio for them instead of Orca anyway.
Especially the makerworld integration for casual users. My wife puts about 80% of the print time on ours and it's all from the android app, printing models she finds on the app. I though of getting a Prusa, but to be realistic I can't even put the P1S in LAN only mode because that part won't work, so I'm stuck with it for now.
I mean they pushed the industry forward. I have bought two of their printers and don't regret it as they still continue to function. My next printer well not be theirs though. I just hope by the time I am ready to get a new one printers have become as easy as theirs. I want to print not have to tweak my printer to print. And yes I have done that for decades but I don't want to anymore.
I totally get the feeling. Some things that used to be a tinker hobby and now I just want them to work.
Exactly. And I think we need to be honest about our criticism of Bambu. A lot of it is legitimate complaints. They stepped into a community that built itself around sharing ideas and group effort. They benefited from the work of the community and made some great innovations, but refused to share those innovations with the community that had shared so much with them. That's a dick move.
But there's also an uncomfortable element of the Bambu hatred coming from people who have been part of the community for a long time. They tinkered and toiled using weed-eater line through modified hot glue guns and spent years buulding up shitty machines into something serviceable. They did awesome things, and they should be proud if it. But they can also be gatekeepers who are hostile to those who just want to print something without needing to understand g-code or what pressure advance is.
They don't want new users who haven't made the tinkering and fiddling the hobby. They see the confusion and technical knowledge required as a rite of passage all users need to experience. They were a huge part of making 3D printing what it is today, but (just like Bambu) hey don't want the next guys to benefit from it.
That's the problem, it cannot be proprietary when based off slic3R. It's not their property to lock down.
The slicer is not proprietary, but the networking plugin for printer communication is
I don't know how their plugin work, but wouldn't AGPL "unproprietary" it?
Its source code is not available so that's not a thing unfortunately.
From my understanding Bambu is playing "who has the bigger pile of money" while others are stepping up and playing "who has the legal right to fork AGPL code?"
I've been interested in getting a 3d printer for a while now but am not deep into what's out there, does the ender 3 pro require any cloud or services that I can't run locally to function?
Edit: same question for the snapmaker U1.
Also, where do you source your fillament from? Any other ongoing maintenance requirements (material-wise)?
I want a 3d printer, not some new relationship with a corporation.
I’ve come from an ender 3 pro to a Bambu P1S with AMS. As others have said the Bambu environment makes it “apple-like” (for better or for worse) to print. Set up, to print is maybe an hour? You spend the majority of your time with the printer actually printing. Which is why everyone (I included) are so upset about how Bambu is handling this.
Meanwhile the ender you spend the majority of your time getting the printer settings right, adding mods, adding firmware, trying new slicers, bed leveling, etc. I spent so much more time tinkering with my ender than printing that i just gave up printing altogether.
If you want to just print things it’s really hard to beat a Bambu. If you want to tinker and actually learn what 3d printing does and how it works, other printers like an Ender is the way to go.
Jumping off of this, as someone who's been adjacent to 3D printing spaces for over a decade now, what is a good beginner 3D printer for someone who would rather spend less up front and spend more time calibrating and tinkering? Is it still the Ender 3 Pro?
The thing is unless you need the slightly bigger bed size, the A1 mininfrom Bambu is simply a better product. It's faster, easier, and often cheaper (I got mine for like 150-ish). And the full-size A1 is also bigger.
That's the thing with Bambu. What's made them such a disruptor and given them the opportunity to be shitty is that they make a really good product with excellent software at less than half the price of a comparable Prusa.
And with the new SnapMaker U1 slapping back, they dropped their prices again. The new X2D is half the cost of the last-gen X1 and has an extra nozzle.
So what would you recommend to someone who wants to get their hands a bit dirty and is reluctant to put anything on the network?
Also realistically the printer would live in my detached garage which I haven't yet bothered to setup any sort of wifi in, so a connected printer would balloon the scope of such a project and cause it to intersect with and be blocked by other queued network projects, and sometimes I just don't want to faff with networking after working how many hours faffing with networking professionally
If your don't mind assembling the printer yourself, get a Voron 2.4 kit. It's an open-source 3d printer, perfect for getting your hands dirty. Much easier to upgrade and repair than a Bambu.
Edit: I believe Voron printers are typically used over a network, but you should be able to just plug a monitor into it and do the slicing and printing on it directly. They typically have a Raspberry Pi or a Pi clone built into them for running Klipper.
Oooh I didn't even know about Voron but I'm very intrigued now by what I've read about them
In that case, for a random person I'd still recommend Bambu unless you're boycotting on ethical grounds.
Their printers run just fine without a network. Just export the g-code to a microSD card, put the card in the printer, and select the model from the card. It also allows you to use whatever slicer you want that way.
It's really only cloud printing that's locked behind Bambu Studio.