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3D printers · Creality Ender

Creality Ender 3

18owners with an opinion
38%of verdicts positive
4/7positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and repairability; criticized for reliability and ease of use.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
I have a cheap Ender 3. I’ve had it for about 5 years and it’s been just fine. I did do a few upgrades along the way that helped a lot (bed leveling probe l, direct drive extruder, and second z axis screw drive). Figuring out how to add those was part of the fun. If you wanted something more production/out of the box ready, you can certainly find it. But it doesn’t have to be a big initial investment. You can start small and then upgrade as you go.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I got an Ender 3 3D printer for last Christmas and while making gadgets and toys and gifts has been fun, it's fundamentally reawakened my interests in being creative again. I've learned new skills with silicone and resin, gotten back into 3D modeling (and finally learned Blender), discovered a bunch of new visual artists, and found new online communities to inspire me after a long day looking at code.
Likes it
I upgraded from the 3 to the 5, and had some great experiences with it. My Ender 3 was such a Printer of Theseus; I think I'd replaced everything except the extruded aluminium frame by the time I upgraded. But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;) Oh, and fuck Bambu. Never touching their shit.
Neutral
Sure I'm certain that is the endgame for Bambu, but I'm also sure that people won't stand for it as long as there's any kind of competition (of which there's currently loads) and will move to the next best thing. They've come out of nowhere and captured the current gen, for the next one we'll probably see someone new. I don't really buy the longevity angle for something that's moving so fast in terms of tech, my old Ender 3 lasted long enough to make itself obsolete in practically all aspects. I had to junk a perfectly working machine because it became something not worth putting filament into. With such improvements each gen I'd rather have a cheaper machine that runs for a few years. Maybe we've already peaked but I seriously doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see non planar antialiasing as stock at twice the speed and half the loudness, making what we use today once again become a waste of filament. Disposable low cost crap makes a whole lot more sense imo. Remember the first gen Makerbots? Horrid machines with glass beds, mandatory raft, quality barely worth a mention. They cost 5k and were obsolete in like two years tops. That's roughly how I see Pruša's approach as well.
Neutral
I was chatting with my sister about this. She has a P2S and highly recommends it. I did a bit of research and I agree with her. The other one that stood out was the snap maker U1 (it has a nice elegant solution for multi-colored prints, and promises to be open etc going forward). I'm personally going with the P2S with AMS for the simplicity of the bambu ecosystem (though I'm conflicted about it). Still after using the creality ender 3 for a long time I'm excited to see how much easier things can be. :)
Neutral
I agree entirely with your first two sentences (I like both). But I disagree pretty hard with the rest of it. An X1C spits out prints that are higher quality than my ender 3 would do, in a variety of materials the ender couldn't handle, even with a HUGE amount of time understanding the ender and how it works (incl upgrading or replacing just about every component). Further - I think some of the divide is between the folks printing models, and the folks printing functional parts. When I print nice models (ex: toys for my kids or gifts) then sure - I tweak still because appearances matter. But if I just want a functional print because I need an enclosure for an electronics project, or I want a hanger for my wall, or I need a new footpad for a desk... Mediocre is a-ok. And again... The X1C is not spitting out mostly mediocre parts. If anything - the "learning" you need to do mostly lives in the slicers/models at this point.
Likes it
Yeah, I did the printer as a hobby thing when I built my first reprap. It was fun, and I learned a ton, but the state of the art in 2014 just wasn't there for low-end machines to be reliable. I replaced it with a prusa in 2019,and I have had zero issues at all with it. The only print failures I've had were either due to part design or bad filament (pla stored in a humid garage). I've been super impressed with the quality of the machine, and have printed some fairly challenging parts. Plus, the whole machine is open and hackable. I didn't really even consider other printers, since I wanted to support prusa and what they have done for the community. Although I have used a friend's ender 3, and I was pretty impressed with the quality for the price.
Doesn’t like it
I don't think it has anything to do with a halo around Asian companies. Bambu and Creality are both Chinese. I've used plenty of Prusa, Ender, and Bambu printers, and this is what I've found: Bambu: break the least. That's it, that's the whole secret to why everyone recommends them. Sure, the print quality is good, and there are some nice QOL things, but they took off because you can hit print and expect to get a print. Prusa: These are mostly reliable. Not as reliable as Bambu. The Prusa printer I have right now has had two fatal malfunctions over the years I've used it, both of which were due to design flaws Bambu printers don't have. They are making a lot of progress, and I hope they catch back up. Creality (Ender manufacturer): No one should buy Creality products. They are worthless. Everything from the lowest bargain-bin Ender 3 to the latest K2 Plus will break and might burn the building down.
Likes it
I just booted up a Creality ender 3 from 2017 that’s been dormant in my neighbors shed for years. My maker-friend scoffed and said toss it, get a bambu ! And yeah it’s a chore to level the bed every time I bumped into it and I might have to unclog the nozzle every once in a while but I did print a replacement part (the nut for the spool holder) and I know ill be able to maintain it, barebones means there’s not much to break. As for operating systems, I’ve been daily driving Fedora 40 and now 41 with gnome environment and it’s been the best OS experience I’ve had yet, I haven’t had to open terminal once to configure a single thing, all my apps are installed from the software “store” GUI and I’ve got the sleep and wake behavior all dialed in the way I like. It runs equally well on a 2014 Intel Mac mini and a 2024 Mac Studio via Asahi Linux, which was also a super simple install process (uninstalling it and reclaiming the disk space required me to reset the whole drive but pretty sure that was my fault for deleting the asahi partition the wrong way) Anyway maybe give it a shot, and self hosting things is only getting easier, Jellyfin and Immich have changed my life, at least the virtual side of it :)
Doesn’t like it
Same here. Now I have an A1 + A1 mini too. It's amazing. This is what I dreamed of when I built my first RepRap. I did get me Ender 3 working eventually but the print quality isn't as good as any of the Bambu printers and it's super slow. The new CoreXY Prusa One is also a very good buy when it comes out but the A1/A1 mini in particular are just such a good deal at the moment.
Doesn’t like it
I just picked up some Opto-E telecentric lenses with this exact idea in mind. (That plus possibly scanning microfiche so I don't have to mess with focus.) If I can do it on a small scale with my long-suffering Ender 3 (which keeps getting weirder and weirder stuff stuck to it), then transplanting it to a larger motion platform is trivial. What did you do for software?
Doesn’t like it
I agree. I started with a working, cheap printer and then decided I wanted a big Voron. I printed the parts for a Voron 0 and made that, and then used that to print a Voron 2.4. The print-it-forward program was months in arrears when I looked at it, and it was very expensive to pay someone else to print them without the print-it-forward. I could have bought an Ender 3 and printed it myself cheaper. Technically that cheap printer still works, but my 2 Vorons are so much better than I don't even consider using it.
Doesn’t like it
Could you elaborate on the SV06's shortcomings? I bought one after selling my Ender 3 (the shittiest machine ever made) and it has everything you want from a home 3D printer. Auto-calibration, no manual bed leveling, an excellent extruder, powder-coated PEI sheet (can print PETG straight on the bed without damaging it) and it's really sturdy. Oh, and it works out of the box (after some quick assembly). It's basically a Prusa without the signature orange and exorbitant pricing. (nothing against Prusa, I love their products, they're just really expensive for the average tinkerer.)
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
Mostly because they are proprietary in a community with an open philosophy, and for being successful doing that. Most consumer-level 3D printers are derived from the RepRap project, which was about making a 3D printer that prints 3D printers. So if you want your own printer, find someone who already has one to print the specialized parts for you, add a few standard parts (screws, motors, etc...) and build your own, which you can then use to make 3D printers for others. You can then share designs, improve, etc... Totally in the open source spirit, of course, the software part is similarly open source, usually GPL licenced. And this spirit is found in most of the consumer-level 3D printing world. With open source firmwares and slicers, easy to modify machines, and standard parts. I think one of the the companies that exemplify this the most is Prusa. They 3D print their printers using their own printers, and open source most for their work. But then BambuLabs came along, and they have proprietary components, a proprietary firmware and a cloud-based system. Their slicer is open source, they don't really have a choice because it is based on GPL software, but they recently made it harder to use the forked version some people made (namely OrcaSlicer), and they did so via an automatic update. Of course people didn't really appreciate. But maybe the worst part is that BambuLabs printers are actually really great and popular printers, for an affordable (but not cheap) price. And many…
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
As for the printer, ender3 and ender5 are good budget buys, if you add a ABL sensor it's as good as prusa if not better while I'd argue my ender5 prints better than my prusa. Here is the filament extruder I built: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... You might find this interesting as many people end up spending thousands of dollars in filament and lots of wasted printed parts as getting accurate part takes several attempts.