I spent a year trying to get my Prusa factory assembled mk4s to print properly. Prusa support even eventually sent me a full replacement printer that had the EXACT same problem out of the box.

I returned it, bought an LDO Voron kit for a 2.4 350mm and haven’t looked back.

The kit had pre made harnesses, which was 100% the right move for me.

(Incidentally, the drawers for my desk I was trying to print on the Prusa originally are now printed and finished on the Voron, and working great…)

2.4 R2 owner chiming in. I built mine about 3 years ago after window shopping for a year.

Why Voron in 2026?

• They’re fully open source. This has a couple of benefits such as (basically) guaranteed repairability in the future and super easy modability. Basically all the parts are standard, so you should have no problem sourcing replacements. Want to change something? Download the official CAD and remix
• Being open source means there’s a huge quantity of official and unofficial mods available, as well as tons and tons and tons (and tons and tons, but I’m getting tired of digging up links) of commercial hard parts if you want to tinker. Yes, commercial printers also have mods available, and even some hard part swaps, but Voron is next level if you like to tinker. Even if you don’t like to tinker, some mods are fantastic from a quality of life perspective and of course there are many many vendors that will sell you kitted parts
• The printer itself is highly capable in ways that go beyond just being CoreXY. Both the 2.4 and Trident can mechanically get their bed and gantry in plane because they use multiple z-steppers to move the bed (trident) or gantry (2.4) up/down. Bambu’s printers use a single stepper and a belt to connect things
• Even if you buy a BOM in the box you’ll learn a ton building the printer

Why not Voron?

• No official store or kit means you’re going to either rabbit hole who to buy a BOM-in-a-box from or spend a lot of time self sourcing. I personally went with West3D’s configurator
• You’re building a printer from literal nuts, bolts, linear rails, and extrusions. It’s not a hard build, but it is a long build. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can build a Voron, but it’s going to take 20-40 hours
• They’re not the budget proposition they once were
• You’ll spend more time thinking through the build up front (who to buy from, what components to swap, what out of the gate mods, etc). Easy example: want to tune for resonance compensation? Gotta mount/wire up an accelerometer on the toolhead, unless you use one of the many tool-head PCBs that include one
• Cable chains look dope, but wire breaks are real. They’re easy to repair, but they’re annoying. Granted, you can just go umbilical out the gate. LDO’s Nitehawk SB is dope
• You want to go even bigger. You can stretch a Voron taller, but Rat Rigs go quite a bit bigger

Edit: final thought. IMO I do not find myself wanting for “tech” and there’s really not much missing from a Voron out of the gate. Nearly anything a Bambu can do is easily adopted to a Voron if you want to.

Just don’t ask one to read poetry to you.

I can’t comment on the other ones unfortunately, but there are a ton of mods available for Vorons that are still coming out. They’re solid platforms and great if you’re someone who likes to tinker, imo they’re also super solid as “just print” device. I’ve got mine with canbus and built a filament changer, but there’s tool changer mods I’ve seen as well.

If you do go for a voron, I’d suggest a trident. I have a 2.4 but I recently built a fixed gantry printer like how the trident is setup, it’s a lot easier to work with.

I would love to love Prusa’s printers, but they just keep lacking IMO. They cost an absolute premium price, but you get a sort of “yesterday’s tech” experience with with them. I can get two voron v2.4 350x350x350mm kits for the price of a single Prusa core one L, and aside from active chamber temp control the core one L has basically the same functional features as the vorons.

The web-interface experience is so much nicer with klipper + mainsail/fluidd than what prusa offers. The abundance of additional community-made features for klipper is immense and usually extremely easy to implement, it’s a shame prusa insists on their own ecosystem.

So the conundrum with the Voron world is that the Trident and 2.4 are basically as good as you are going to get for the constraints. You can add the Monolith gantry but that’s an involved mod. You can add a toolchanger or a filament changer, that’s another involved mod. And there’s a bunch of really great mods but each of them adds complexity to the build, makes the BOM larger, etc.

The one thing with the Voron is that if you want the highest accels, you probably need to ditch the extrusions. But then you can’t make it as an open source printer because you’d need to do a lot to get a rigid metal frame and there would be minimum orders, etc.

And, overall, if you look at Qidi, they’ve been making Klipper-based cube printers with active chamber heaters for quite a few years now, so the more recent Qidis are really just mods atop the ur-Qidi, kinda. So a lot of the new hotness, outside of a few Bambu things, exists as mods for the Voron. We’ll ignore that Prusa had problems delivering new printer designs for a while.

Allegedly the INDX that looks actually pretty neat that’s going to be on the Prusa is also going to be available as a kit for the Voron.

Neither of my Vorons are stock. The Trident came from Formbot so it already was a CAN-bus design with some Formbot tweaks. You definitely want a filament motion sensor, there’s a bunch of options there. I swapped to the DragonBurner toolhead, I’d probably try the A4T instead if both of them were full-sized printers. My Trident has the inverted electronics mod, that felt pretty handy. My 0.2 has the electronics compartment rearranged.

I bought a trodon 2.0 when they first came out. It’s been rock solid. I also have 2 qidi max3s. They’ve been equally rock solid. My trodon is still reprap based and the wiring is proprietary so getting input shaping would take some work. It’s build into the qidis so i can push them harder. I haven’t priced the voron clones lately but when i got mine it was about $400 more than i paid for my qidis. And it was totally disassembled (other than the gantry iirc). Given that, when i got my 3rd replacement printer, it was another qidi. All these new printers are head and shoulders above the ones i started with (cr10, ender 5). I sometimes miss the tinkering the old ones required, but i don’t miss the failed prints 65 hrs into a 70 hr job for some stupid crap that was more prevalent back then.

that reminds me I never finished mine. more or less standard trident except welded stainless square tube instead of aluminum extrusion. I ran out of argon and never got around to getting more.

with that, two modded ender3, one micron variant, and all of them not running for one reason or another and the reasons all being tied to my low motivation to do anything and lack of energy, I would recommend a branded one but I’m not up to date on if any stand out amongst the competitors.