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Best Filaments for 3D Printing 2026

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We printed hundreds of spools and miles of filament to find the best materials for 3D printing.

Best Filaments for 3D Printing
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
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Filament for 3D printing comes in an overwhelming array of materials, colors and price points. Sadly, many new users will shy away from trying interesting materials not because they lack confidence, but because they don’t have a good recommendation. That’s why we’ve built this guide. Every filament on this list ran through our 3D printers with flying colors.

Even one of the best 3D printers on the market won’t perform well if given the wrong material for the job. Likewise, some of the best budget 3D printers around can knock your socks off with a $15 roll of bargain PLA.

Denise Bertacchi
Denise Bertacchi
Freelance Reviewer

Denise Bertacchi is a Contributing Writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering 3D printing. Denise has been crafting with PCs since she discovered Print Shop had clip art on her Apple IIe. She loves reviewing 3D printers because she can mix all her passions: printing, photography, and writing.

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10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Ireeb
    Which criteria were used to rank these filaments? Did you perform any mechanical tests at all? They can behave drastically different under stress and there you see some more differences between strong and cheap filaments.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    It's completely baffeling that a cheap "cardboard spool" is a pro and better "plastic spool" is a con.

    First: cardboard holds moisture and degrades in shipping, meaning your brand new vacuum-sealed filament can arrive wet and dusty.

    Second: it's just outright nuts to me that somebody buying materials for an inefficient and highly wasteful plastic manufacturing process would be morally opposed to using plastic or creating plastic waste. These things aren't even bulk packaged. To 3D print, you need to buy piles of individual rolls, each with its own vacuum bag and packet of silica gel, put into a roll sized box, that's put into a bigger box before being shipped halfway around the world to your doorstep.

    There's nothing "green" about 3D printing, and there never will be. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is a brazen marketing gimmick spoken from the mouth of a salesman. It's a hustle. They may as well be a used car dealer trying to sell you the benefits of organic, locally-sourced, farm-to-table gasoline.
    If you're not comfortable with waste or throwing away plastic, then maybe learn how to whittle instead?
    Reply
  • Ireeb
    Giroro said:
    It's completely baffeling that a cheap "cardboard spool" is a pro and better "plastic spool" is a con.

    First: cardboard holds moisture and degrades in shipping, meaning your brand new vacuum-sealed filament can arrive wet and dusty.

    Second: it's just outright nuts to me that somebody buying materials for an inefficient and highly wasteful plastic manufacturing process would be morally opposed to using plastic or creating plastic waste. These things aren't even bulk packaged. To 3D print, you need to buy piles of individual rolls, each with its own vacuum bag and packet of silica gel, put into a roll sized box, that's put into a bigger box before being shipped halfway around the world to your doorstep.

    There's nothing "green" about 3D printing, and there never will be. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is a brazen marketing gimmick spoken from the mouth of a salesman. It's a hustle. They may as well be a used car dealer trying to sell you the benefits of organic, locally-sourced, farm-to-table gasoline.
    If you're not comfortable with waste or throwing away plastic, then maybe learn how to whittle instead?
    Glass-half-empty kinda guy right there.
    I really love the logic of "we can't reduce the impact on the environment to zero, so we should just not care at all." It's like saying "the catalyst in the car doesn't reduce the emissions to zero, so we should just remove it and all filters." While yes, a gas car will never emit fresh air, we should still try to reduce emissions as far as possible, or else we'd have many more problems much faster. Unless you love breathing in the thick black smoke.

    PLA is a bioplastic. It's created from plants, that consume CO2. When you either compost or burn PLA, you're only putting back the CO2 to the atmosphere the plants took out of it. The same goes for cardboard, and many manufacturers even use recycled cardboard. Other plastics, such as those the spools are made from, are made from fossil materials that used to be underground as oil. We pump that to the surface, turn it into plastic and burn it, now we've added CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before.

    By the way, cardboard spools are usually more expensive to manufacture than plastic spools. But where I live, cardboard is cheaper to dispose of than the kind of plastic spools are made from. I haven't had any issue with cardboard spools so far, no damaged spool, no wet filament. The only time a print failed because a spool got stuck was on a plastic spool.
    3D-Printing will always use up some resources, but there is still a large difference between using fossile vs. renewable ressources. And even if we can't reduce the amount of fossile ressources to zero, we can still try to reduce them as much as we can instead of trying to burn limited ressources as fast as we can.
    Reply
  • Sceptical87
    You have zero credibility after calling out plastic spools as bad whilst reviewing...plastic.
    Especially after calling vacuum sealing (with..... plastic) as a pro.
    All to print (mostly) useless plastic trinkets that end up in landfill anyway.
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    I have to disagree with a "con" of a plastic reel. After wasting 2/3rds of a reel of PETG with nothing coming out good because of underextrusion, I through the crap out. The problem? Cardboard reels. When the Inland filament was wound, it was wound so tight that the cardboard gave way and the layer got wound below multiple other layers. When the printer attempted to unwind the reel it couldn't pull it out and caused under-extrusion as well as complete stoppages. I nearly pulled my dryer off of the top of my printer when I gave the filament a pull to un-stick it.
    Which gets to a second reason I don't like them. They don't stay round. To play it safe you can't let them sit in your dryer and dispense from it. You have to use the center whole as the reel either wasn't very round to start with or went out of round over time, sitting in the dryer and/or heat.
    Third, after this I built a winding/rewinding device ( listed here: https://www.printables.com/model/407688-bambu-lab-p1-x1-x1c-x1cc-filament-spool-switcher-w ) and I rewind my filament before using it if it is a cardboard reel.
    I specifically look for the plastic reels and I'll buy them over the Greta hugging, tree hugging cardboard lovers. :)
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    Giroro said:
    It's completely baffeling that a cheap "cardboard spool" is a pro and better "plastic spool" is a con.

    First: cardboard holds moisture and degrades in shipping, meaning your brand new vacuum-sealed filament can arrive wet and dusty.

    Second: it's just outright nuts to me that somebody buying materials for an inefficient and highly wasteful plastic manufacturing process would be morally opposed to using plastic or creating plastic waste. These things aren't even bulk packaged. To 3D print, you need to buy piles of individual rolls, each with its own vacuum bag and packet of silica gel, put into a roll sized box, that's put into a bigger box before being shipped halfway around the world to your doorstep.

    There's nothing "green" about 3D printing, and there never will be. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is a brazen marketing gimmick spoken from the mouth of a salesman. It's a hustle. They may as well be a used car dealer trying to sell you the benefits of organic, locally-sourced, farm-to-table gasoline.
    If you're not comfortable with waste or throwing away plastic, then maybe learn how to whittle instead?
    Spot on. I saw your post after posting. When I saw the "Con" of a plastic reel I immediately lost it. Children with their wishful thinking rather than experience with their cardboard crap.
    If you think that green is the way to go, look at every TPU reel and the mfg'rs know better than to wind this until cardboard waste.
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    Ireeb said:
    Which criteria were used to rank these filaments? Did you perform any mechanical tests at all? They can behave drastically different under stress and there you see some more differences between strong and cheap filaments.
    The criteria was that their bench boat was recognizable as being a benchy? Nah. it was that the reel was re-cycle waste. Too green-centric to give an actual objective evaluation.
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    An interesting comment about Polyterra filament being "slightly heavier". What you are telling us is that you get less filament than others because reels are sold by weight. Did you measure the weight of these or was this a simply observation?
    I've wondered sometimes about how much actually filament is in different reels. I'm convinced that you get a lot less milage out of a 1kg reel of PETG than that of PLA. But how much?
    Now that would be a good article.
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    Ireeb said:
    Which criteria were used to rank these filaments? Did you perform any mechanical tests at all? They can behave drastically different under stress and there you see some more differences between strong and cheap filaments.
    Addendum: I don't know how you got a price of $19 for Matterhacker's on Amazon.
    Reply
  • Mythy
    I could pick this list of garbage filament apart but clearly a professional 3d printer didn't write any of this.

    The real list...

    Cheap/quality = Sunlu $10.80 -$12 a roll (plastic spools) direct
    Mica powder filaments (micro glitter) = Ziro $25 amazon
    Premium = Polymaker (ouch)
    Cheap Black only (prints amazing minimal bleed) Elegoo PLA + Black = $40-$45 (4 roll packs) Amazon
    Reply