2023 Best 3D Printers For Your Business Or Print Farm Buying Guide

In this guide:

• The single most important factor when choosing a printer.
  Hint; it’s not print speed or quality. 
• Why you shouldn’t buy based on price, and the benefits of a trusted name. 
• How to choose between a Prusa MK4 or Bamboo X1 Carbon for example for your business.
• Which SLA Resin printers are the best workhorses and why.

Getting the right 3D printers for your business can be a minefield, with hundreds of different machines available. Each model of 3D printer requires you to invest hours “learning the ropes” even before we consider the output factors we need and the available investment we have. 

So, this isn’t something you can blindly jump into, because getting it wrong can lead to countless hours of frustration and lost profits. 

In this article I’m going to help you cut through the noise and get down to the most important factors for your business, because your business is likely different in some way. 

That means I won’t be quoting every stat and figure on printers - I’ll just be sharing with you what is actually important and why when making a purchasing decision - for either a small or home business.

This article will be useful to many looking to buy printers for their business, but primarily we’re talking small businesses here anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month on their first hobby printer, all the way to those doing less than $1 million annually selling their 3D prints.

People make a lot of mistakes choosing printers to start a business. I’m going to help you avoid those. For example, I have a client who had a print farm with 47 Creality Ender 3’s when I started working with him - except only about half were ever working, the others were on his constant “to-fix” list. 

Don’t get me wrong, an Ender 3 is a great ~$300 machine to learn on as a hobbyist, but it’s a terrible printer for business. 

Likewise, don’t buy loads of different printers. Each one takes a learning curve and that time could be better spent growing your business.

If you expect to build a print farm as you scale your business, they should all be the same unless you need to switch type because the need arises. I.e from FDM to SLA (Resin) for example. 

Also worth mentioning, I don’t have any affiliation with any printer manufacturers (any more) so I can give you entirely unbiased advice. Which is more than can be said for many other “buyer’s guides” out there.

I’ll also make some specific printer suggestions which I’ll periodically update in the future as required - so you can keep your business plan current. It’s likely my suggestions won’t be “popular” but my findings are based on experience and the metrics that matter. 

But before I share what specific printers you might consider, you need to understand why you need a certain printer over others. So many miss this vital point, and rush in to buying a printer or 10 that seem like a good idea at the time, but then realise that they were unreliable, or couldn’t produce the parts that their customers actually wanted. 

So I’m going to assume that you know full well what product or items you’re going to be printing beyond this point - you’re clear what kind of business model you’re operating. You know what visual quality the customer is expecting, you know the size, you know what the part has to do (i.e strength, durability or weight criteria). 

If you don’t know these things; if you don’t already know what you’re making - I’m afraid you will not be able to accurately decide what printers you need. It’d be like calling up a car dealership and saying you want them to deliver you a new car today, but you’ve not told them what type of car you need.

So they have no idea how many seats it should have, how fast it should be, trim levels etc. etc. 

...you get the point. 

So if you are just starting out and deciding what you should be making to sell your prints, I invite you to check out my guide to begin with, where I help break down what you need to look for when trying to figure out what 3D printed products you could sell. Click the button below for your free copy.

Because as hobbyists we might decide on what printer to buy first, and then decide what to print with it. But as business owners we decide on what we’re gonna print on it first, then decide what machine is going to be best for the job. 

So let’s dive in…

Reliability is the single greatest priority for you when choosing a 3D printer for as a small business business use. If it's just you or a small team running the show, you can’t afford to have surprise down-time. 

I can’t stress this enough - building a print farm with general OK-for-hobbyist printers from China (sorry, China) is going to lock you up in breakdowns, extra maintenance and eventually; increased anxiety. 

You might think replacing a part for a machine is just half an hour of your time, perhaps. Or having to re-level the bed every few weeks, and that’s worth a $500 - $700 saving per machine?

But the reality is that it’s going to happen when you’re at your busiest, you’ll have so many orders and won’t have the time to fix it…

So you put it off for a few days or weeks, and before long you’ve had restricted production capacity for all that time and then the other printers might have similar faults and you have mounting orders and no time to fix those printers. 

That’s a hobbyist mindset, and it will keep you stuck. 

So stay away from those “hobby” printers, like Creality, Anycubic etc.

Turns out machines running machines get much higher reliability for same repetitive tasks than humans can, who knew? 

The next most important factor for a 3D printer, is the speed. Why? Because a single printer that is 3 times faster than another, is the same as having 3 printers.

So speed is better than price. A lot better. Let me explain; 

Take the Prusa MK3s, it’s now reduced to $900. The new Prusa MK4 is $1100, so the price is $200 more. 

Which is cheaper? 

The new MK4 is over 3 times cheaper than the MK3s. 

That’s because, in draft mode it’s 4 times faster. So having a MK4 is like having 4 x MK3S’s, which means comparatively for business output; using MK4 tech is like buying MK3s for $1100 / 4 = $275 each. 

While other factors, such as print quality and build volume do come into play, this for the majority of business owners, is a much lower concern - essentially because most popular printers on the market now, that are recent releases (within the last 3 years) have respectable quality settings.

Like the car analogy above, all new cars have very similar safety ratings, so it tends not to be your primary concern when looking for one (though, still worth checking). 

Most of the sorts of products and parts you’ll be printing for customers, if you’re making 3D prints to sell, will not need to be “injection moulded” levels of surface quality. This may surprise you, but certainly, for functional prints, the use of the part is the primary concern. 

For small detailed and intricate parts, your best option by far is an SLA or DLP Resin-based printer. Not only are these machines very high quality output, but for small parts, they’re insanely fast. 

That’s because a part that’s about 1” x 1” x 2” tall might take a few hours to print. But if you wanted to print 25 of them on the bed all at once, it would take the same amount of time. 

So, if you know the size and quantity you’ll likely be needing to print, you’ll have a much better idea on which printers you’ll want to invest in. 

One of the cons to MSLA, SLA or DLP resin printers is that the strength of the finished part compared with FDM (filament) based machines is typically much lower. They’re also a little more messy, and the resin if you get any on your skin is detrimental to your health, so you want to make sure you’re taking the necessary precautions. 

So your price per print is going to be an important factor when choosing a printer, and it ties in closely with the print area of the bed of the printer and of course the size of your model.

Total print volume can be factor, but you’re unlikely to use the full amount of build volume offered by a printer (which is the bed size, times the available height) - far more important for printing most products is just the bed area.

That’s because it’s rare that you’ll print very large or tall objects profitably with a 3D printer. This takes a lot of time, so eats into your profit margins and can increase failure chances, which we always want to avoid.

So it’s not that you can’t make money printing medium or large sized stuff, it’s just much harder. We always advise our clients to create products that have at least a 10x profit margin (meaning if a print costs $2 all-in, you’re selling it for at least $20-$25), as this is a critical figure for scaling any 3D printing business. 

To illustrate Price Per Print, we could compare two of the best SLA 3D printers for business: