Prusa Xl Or Creality K2 Plus? The Best Large-Format 3D Printer In 2025

Now I expect a chicken, you know, approximately half the size of a good turkey, not the size of a carrier pigeon. Hi I'm Steve from 1233D. Today we are revisiting the Prusa XL and the K2 Plus. So we have reviewed both of these machines independently, so if you haven't seen either of those videos we will leave links to them in the description. Needless to say we have reviewed them before but we thought it would be beneficial to you guys to see the pros and cons to each. To let you make your own mind up which one would be best suited to your needs. Now in terms of consumer grade, not commercial, consumer grade machines, although you could argue the XL is also commercial grade, consumer grade, but we'll leave that there. Which one would be best suited to you? We've picked these machines because these are typically the larger form factor machines, so by that I mean print volume. The XL for example has a print volume of 360 millimetres cubed and the K2 Plus has a print volume of 350 millimetres cubed. So they are both quite large fill volumes, capable of printing large prints in high quality, in multi-material if you so wish. So pros and cons to both. I will firstly start with the Creality K2 Plus. So this isn't being displayed currently with the CFS unit because you can buy this as a standalone unit or you can buy it with the CFS unit. So for those of you who don't know what CFS unit is, it's basically a four material stroke colour changing unit, similar to an AMS. Chris has informed me there's one by my feet, I will move these and I'll pop it on top so you can see. Oh behold the CFS unit from Creality. CFS unit, where is it Biomagic? It appeared. So this, basically you load your four spools of filament into it, the filament then feeds through the unit into one single tube, because there's a buffer on the back that basically divert four tubes into one which then goes to your extruder. This is a cost effective way of manufacturing printers, so it brings the price of the machine down substantially over a tool changer, but it does come with some sacrifices. You will sacrifice material because these produce waste. However you look at it, if you're printing in multi-colour or multi-material, then this unit will produce more waste than a tool changing unit. The reason for that is literally because the nozzle has to purge out the old filament colour before it replaces it with the new filament colour, so it produces poops which drop out the back of the machine via a chute and it'll also print a purge tower on the build plate alongside your prints as well to basically purge the nozzle with the new colour filament that you are swapping to. So this increases the waste, it also increases your print time because it has so many moves to do before it will start actually printing the next layer. So depending on how complex your model is in terms of colour changes or details will determine how long your print time is with a system like this. A tool changer on the other hand is a lot more efficient because each tool head is loaded up with its own individual colour filament which eliminates poops. You still have a purge tower because it needs to make sure that the filament hasn't set in the nozzle, so it'll purge the filament through. So with this you don't get poops but you still get a purge tower. You can do clever things within PrusaSlicer to purge on the infill so you eliminate the purge tower. These are all things that you can try mess around with. Tinkra actual leisure. This system works out a lot cheaper than a tool changer because you only have one extruder, this unit takes care of the rest of it itself. So for those of you who haven't got a huge budget this would be probably a worthwhile consideration if you don't mind sacrificing filament waste. Other pros to the machine, I mean we've used this quite heavily, Dan the other technician is currently using this model on a daily basis and has been for the past I've lost count how many weeks. 3D printing a huge model which I'm not going to go into any further details at this point, time will tell and you will see. If you can't see it you're blind, that's all I'm going to say and we haven't encountered any problems with it. I mean we've printed with carbon fiber filaments, we've printed with PLA, ABS, PETG, TPU and whatever we've thrown at the machine it prints it. Or be TPU not through the CFS unit, it's mounted on the side spool holder. It's been really really good. Slicing software for this machine you can use Creality print, however Walker slice out profiles for it. If you're into Walker you can use that slicer, but overall you can tell it is a refined version of the old K-series Core XY machines Creality produced. Definitely up there. In terms of print quality and tolerance we haven't had any issues, I mean these have been printed out on it so you can see threads screwed together perfectly, exactly how you would expect it to. There's no artifacts in the print, there's no real defects at all and again we have another test print, a sunken broken benchy. Printed out perfectly, overhangs and that are exceptional, no issues with this machine at all. The downsides to the machine, there aren't many. It's big, it's heavy, but it's all in a compact. What you see here as a footprint is literally what you get, that will be the amount of room it'll take on your workbench, desk, wherever you decide to house it. What I will say, the machine has a glass lid, if you're taking the glass lid off you don't need it, this just saves the filament becoming too warm in the extruder, softening which will cause clogs, you don't want any of that. Just for the sake of it, take the lid off if you're printing with those materials, if you're printing with ABS or ASA or PCCF whatever, put the lid on, the chamber does heat so you will get really really decent consistent results. From this machine, let's say we've put a lot of material through it and it prints everything perfectly, provided your slicer settings are set up correctly. The machine is equipped with RFID, so if you use Corelli's own filaments in this machine, it will automatically recognise the material and the colour, whether you insert that into the CFS unit or the spool holder on the side. There is readers in the CFS unit and there is also a reader on the side of the machine, so it really makes slicing your files easy. As soon as you insert that material, the machine picks up and knows what material it is, what colour it is, so if you're printing multi-colour it'll allocate each colour correctly so you don't have to faff around. You can manually do that as well of course. So other points to mention with the machine, we've got three filters in the back, one of those is a heater, so for a chamber heater and we have active carbon filtering for ABS. The bed in this machine is driven via two lead screws, which then slide up and down on smooth rods. We've got an internal web camera, so you can remotely monitor your prints via Corelli Print should you wish to do so. At the back we have the poop chute, the wiper, so basically the nozzle will move to the back of the machine, rub over the little silicone brush, clean the nozzle for you in between colour changes. You've got glass door, glass lid and acrylic side panels. The machine is heavy, I won't lie, I think I would probably estimate maybe 30 kilograms for the machine, because it is quite heavy cast aluminium, so it is a decent solid platform. For the price, it's a good machine. So I shall now move over to the XL. So the XL is a slightly bigger build volume than the K2 Plus and is an open frame printer. That being said, you can buy the enclosure for it, so you can have it fully enclosed if you want to. The added benefits with this machine are you can print multi-colour and multi-material, so I'll explain a little bit more what I mean by that. If you were wanting to print a multi-colour print in PLA, this machine will absolutely do that. If you wanted to print a PLA print for instance with PETG supports, this machine will absolutely do that, because it's heating the nozzles independently of each other. Each of these tools is fitted with its own nozzle, so while the one's parked at the back and the other one's printing, the other one that's parked will be on standby, so it will still be heating the nozzle to make sure that you're not clogging or whatever else, and that's how you can print with this with different material types at the same time. The tool changes very quick, so you will see a slight increase in your print times over a CFS unit, and you will see less filament waste. Now in this day and age, obviously filament costs money. Depending on how much you print, you want to minimise as much waste as you possibly can, because let's face it, if you get a failed print, there's nothing more demoralising than seeing all your hard work after 20 odd hours of printing turn into spaghetti near the end, and you're thinking, oh I've wasted all that filament. We'll put it into the other aspect where you're churning that out the back of your machine constantly, knowingly doing that. You could potentially, in some instances, have half of your filament for a print be waste, and that's the reality of it. We've looked at numerous models that we've printed, and we've weighed the waste compared to what we've actually got in volume of a finished print, and sometimes the waste overtakes the actual finished print volume. So that goes to show, depending on how many colour changes you have, or how detailed that actual model you're printing is, will determine how much waste the machine produces. This will only ever put a layer down on a purchase hour, so regardless to whether you fill the whole plate with models, or put one model, you will have the same purge tower, and it will literally do a layer, swap, go back onto the next layer, so on and so on and so on. Whereas this will do the purge tower, so you have that layer again, but you also have a poop every time. So you're effectively doubling the waste out of this machine. The other pros for the XL are quality. I mean, this machine literally knocks it out the park every time, no matter what you do. Provided the machine's kept clean, maintained, this doesn't cause you any issues, and the print quality is just a step above, if I'm being perfectly honest. We'll put some prints next to each other, side by side, so you can see the differences between the two machines, and we have got these tuned quite well, so we'll let you guys judge for yourself with some images on screen. So it is swings and roundabouts. The XL is more expensive, obviously, and this comes in a number of different configurations. Here we've got the two tool head machine. This is available in a single tool head, which I don't know why you would have an XL single tool head, but some people do. You can add up to five tool heads to this machine, so it will come in single, two tool heads, or five tool heads. But most instances, people either have the dual tool head, or the five. It just gives you more options, more flexibility. The ongoing development and everything else for Prusa is, again, second to none, so they're constantly working on improving things in terms of firmware, you know, machine updates, whatever it may be. So you can pretty much be guaranteed that this machine just won't go out of date, it will evolve. Whereas the K2 Plus, you're going to be limited as to what you can do in terms of upgrades. It is basically a consumer ready-to-go. You can't really upgrade it. You could probably 3D print some cosmetic upgrades for it, but practicality items like extruders, you are going to be bound to the stock configuration that Creality made for this machine. With firmware and whatever else, you can't really tweak or make any changes to the firmware, but Prusa, you can. You can tweak the firmware, you can configure your own firmware if you really wanted to, because it's not locked down, it is open source. Whereas the Creality firmware, it did used to be called Creality Print OS. I don't know whether it still is or not, I'm not sure. You will have certain functionality within the firmware, but you don't have the full access. Prusa, you can use Prusa Connect, which is totally secure. You can send that via your PC, your mobile phone, however you choose to really. You can also use the Prusa machine totally offline, so you can hook it straight up to your PC or laptop via an ethernet cable and send prints directly to the machine from your PC, if you're worried about IP security or anything like that. You've also got the USB stick. You can do a similar thing with the K2 Plus, so you can hook it up via your internal network via the USB drive as you would in any other instance. So both can be used offline if that is your preference, but I would say that Prusa is the more secure option out of the two. So if IP or your data security is very important to you or your company, this will be the one to look at. You can also remove the Wi-Fi module from this machine as well, so zero risk of being hacked or the printer being remotely meddled with, whereas you can't remove that from the K2. So that's just something else to take into account. Who would I say these machines are suitable for? So both are adequately suited to the more advanced home hobbyist, I would say. This machine and this machine really, you could be a total novice and use, but if you're progressing in the world of 3D printing and you're looking for bigger and better, then both of these machines are bigger and better. They're both capable of printing any material you can chuck at them within reason, I mean up to PC filaments. Anything over that, you're not going to get the hot end temperatures out of these machines, but certainly for anything up to that sort of scale, these are adequate for that job. This one with the enclosure obviously. So whether it be, I don't know, large scale prototypes, cosplay props, multi-batch production. So multi-batch production, what I mean is you've got a volume of small scale prints, but you want to maximize the build volume, which also then limits the amount of waste material that you produce. These machines would be ideally suited because you could place, you know, multiple models. I mean the XL, typically we can cram 25 maker coins and a purge tower on this build plate by getting 25 coins on in dual color, basically producing the same amount of waste as what you would if you were to print one. And exactly the same philosophy can be said for this. If you fill this build plate with 25 maker coins in multi-color, then you would produce the same amount of waste as you would if you was to only print one. So maximize your work volume to limit your waste output, if that makes sense, because it only has to purge once per layer. So the more you can cram on that one layer, the less waste you will produce. So that is another, you know, key point to consider. Yes, it will increase the print time, but obviously if you need to fulfill an order for a customer or you've got multiple parts that you need to print for a project that you're working on, then maximize it, you know, sacrifice the print time to alleviate the waste. That would be my top tip for either of these machines. They both operate off a touchscreen UI, albeit the Prusa has another option where you can use the rotary knob or touchscreen, so that's entirely up to you. They're both quite self-explanatory UIs. For anybody familiar with 3D printing, both of these machines will allow you to navigate around them very, very easily. Both machines come with flexible magnetic build plates, making your prints easy to remove. Again, it is imperative to keep your build plates as clean as possible. Periodically, give them a good clean with some hot soapy water, dry them off. If you're really, really fussy about your build plates, give them a wipe with some IPA alcohol, let that evaporate. Spray down some adhesive. We use 3D Lac, link will be in the description. We just find that that's a really nice, easy to clean off adhesive. It works with pretty much everything we print on it and it doubles up as a release agent, so sometimes where your prints bond too well to the build plate, some instances destroy your build plate, 3D Lac can help stop that because it basically puts a film between your print and the build plate. So when the build plate is hot, that film is really, really sticky and tacky, but when it's cooled down, just like a very, very thin film, so it'll put a barrier effectively between your print and the build plate, making removal easy. You'll even see on the build plate when you removed it because it's removed the lac with it, so you'll see a slight different colour on the build plate where you've removed the print. So just take those simple steps, make sure your machines are always kept clean, you know, little bits of filament that are lying around, clean them up. You don't want them jamming in your, you know, your linear rails or on your belts or anything like that because that will start to cause you issues. Basic, you know, routine maintenance. Make sure your nozzle's clean. Little straggles of surface filament that have cooled on the nozzle can give you adverse effects on your print quality, so it's always worth taking the time to get a little wire brush, heat them up a little bit, give them a bit of a rub over, remove any of that gunked on stuff and proceed printing. So I think that really about sums it up. If there is anything that you would like to know about either of these machines or our experiences with either of these machines, please drop a comment in the box below. We will do our best to answer you as quickly as possible and I hope you've enjoyed the video, found it informative and educational. If not, I am so sorry. I'm not at all! Okay, so that is it for this one. I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please don't forget to like, subscribe and share and be sure to catch me in the next one. Bye-bye for now. As always, we aim to have the most competitive 3D printer prices on the market. If you see any of our printers being sold by a mainstream retailer for less, please drop us an email using the link in the description and we'll do our very best to beat their price. Also, if you're watching from outside the UK, check the description for links to our European 123 3D sister stores.