MakerBot Reviews 136

Complete waste of time. And money. Bought this for children ages 10 to 12 for school projects in school could never get the website to let us connect. The support was pathetic at best. The fact that they advertise these for children is embarrassing

I've been running instructional programs, teaching manufacturing tech for over a decade. This company produces by far the worst performing and over-priced products I've ever worked with. Even my tech sales representative, from the distributor, is apologetic. Their printer repeatedly fail, jam, or error out.

Horrible company horrible products never buy from them

What a horrible company to run after its competitor.
these printers repeatedly fail to meet consumer expectation's I didn't want to leave a review before but now in the mist of suing the competition to curve the markets and torture consumers I will.

Paying $65.00 to $70.00 for an undersized (.75kg not 1kg) roll of filament is unacceptable. Having only 5 choices of filament color (red, white, orange, black and gray) is unacceptable. Having a RFID chip inserted into each roll that incorrectly tracks the amount of filament on the roll so that you end up throwing away a significant amount of filament because the MakerBot method printer will not allow it to be printed is, again... UNACCEPTABLE!

I made a terrible decision and spent over $6000 on a Makerbot Method X Carbon-Fiber printer.
I have had nothing but hardware, software and filament issues. Here are a few:
- had to replace the bellows twice, and it is failing again.
- extruder started jamming on the 5th print and I had to replace the extruder.
- Cloudprint is the worst 3d software I have ever experienced. Slow, unreliable, and severely limited.
- $500 worth of ABS-R will not stick to the $500 worth of ABS-R support filament I have, making it all useless for models that need support.
- Support sucks terribly. Phone support extremely frustrating.
STAY AWAY.

Unreliable, expensive, and poor-quality printing.
It often fails, jams, or other issues come up. The filament it uses is ridiculously expensive. If it does work, the quality of the print is very poor. Also, the cloud slicing software is very limited and slow.

We have spent over $15,000 on printers alone and these have been the worst excuses for 3d printers I've ever seen. The constant Issues with even printing, the expensive NFC DRM'ED PLASTIC, the horrible slicer, the even worse cloudprint software. and just abismol print quality for printers that cost about 4 times that of an ender 3v2. this has been going on for 3 months. this company is dying, and doesnt seem to want to save it.

One of the worst investments we have made. The first printer was replaced under warranty and this one is no better. Pick a problem we have experienced them all. You would think for the price it would actually work.

Save your money.

I'm glad I bought my printer used for much less than new prices. If I had bought new I would have already returned it because I submitted two cases to them over not being able to use their software with zero response from them. I can't even log in and it goes to error immediately. I had to end up rewriting their HTML file to even allow me to use that garbage program. As a customer and owner of a VERY expensive piece of equipment, I should not have had to do that. They should be ashamed. Oh, and do yourself a favor and hot glue your print rafts to the bed so the printer doesn't waste your filament on failed, warped prints. Also something that should've been fixed before going on the market.

Makerbot has no US support whatsoever. They have no phone number. Their online chat is never manned. Our company wants to establish Makerbot as a supplier and would simply need a W-9 and email to send PO's. I have asked twice on their website and no response. Yet they fill my email box with promos and other garbage. I've learned how to rebuild the Method X extruders (thankfully) because I can't get or find parts on their website. Never again. We need more printers here but I will NOT be buying the Makerbot carbon. Pass

Hands down among the worst customer service that I've ever encountered. In eight days they've managed to respond to my ticket TWICE with incredibly basic information. I work in an educational setting and was going to order nine more devices this year, but I'm going to go ahead and send my business elsewhere.

I bought a Sketch for college level instruction. The plan was to print out molecules to show to the students as a teaching aid. The salesman I spoke with before buying told me that the printer was capable of doing this, but after over a month of emails and troubleshooting I'm sending the printer back because it can’t do anything that I was promised.

Any model of remote complexity is too big for the printer. Not in physical size, but in the size of the print file. In order to make models that can be handled and are rigid enough to remove the breakaway support you must increase the number of shells from the default of 2 to 4 or 5. The printer cannot do this, which means all the models I printed would just break apart in my hands. No matter how I change the physical dimensions there is no way around the file size being too big for the printer if I want a model robust enough to handle.

Another serious problem is the software. You cannot use .stl files, but instead have to convert them into .makerbot files. You do this using their cloud print server (which is very slow and mostly fails) or download makerbot print to your PC or Mac. The PC version occasionally works, but recently fails every time, and the Mac version will not install on my computer running Big Sur.

Finally, tech support seems very inexperienced with both the printers and software. They gave me a list of "hacks" - none of which worked. When I sent my .stl file for them to work on they never even attempted to see if they could get it to print, or figure out why the printer was saying the file was too large. They sent me a .makerbot file to try but forgot to include the base support which caused the print job to fail.

Overall it was a big waste of my time. I was hoping that 3D printing had come a long way since I first saw a printed molecule about 10 years ago, but this company has failed to make any progress. Unless you are printing out Lego bricks, find your 3D printer elsewhere.

i used the the makerbot replicator+ at work. it is quite bad to be honest . the slicer is cool and the camera too. but the bed is not truely level. the z offset is done on 2 points of the bed ,which is not enough. the bed is kind of wavey and not level at all!! and its even just fixed on one side which is really fractal. there is no heating for the bed? everything is super expensiv if something breakes. it doesnt read any usb stick anymore . i would not buy it because it is definitely not worth the price. if you want to get the really best result just buy a ultimaker . its much much much much better .because you can controll everthing .i am really dissapointet with the makerbot because of the "heating"bed and the f***ing extruder which always jams and always causes errors . at home i got a anet a8 and its also better because i bought great stuff for it. which you also can't really do with a makerbot .you have to live with the stuff they give you. even the super expensive fillament .....

The customer service is so bad. They always don't keep the promise. Even though, we paid the maintenance premium service.

We repeatedly had breakdowns. Had to replace the entire machine after a few short months. Difficulty reaching customer service due to EST and on PST and school and work. Multiple parts have been replaced. After three years my son has barely made 15 small products. Never more than two at a time before a machine malfunction.
I would not recommend this product.

I use their 3D printer and expertise to teach middle and high school students. Their customer service and reliability is excellent. For this reason I highly recommend the company. Thank you.

The installation of the printers and software was bizarre. Part of it was on paper, part on line and part from my cellphone.

The software download was backward (i.e. the "Apple OS" software was for Windows and vice versa.

Tech support was helpful, but the hours were bizarre 6:00 am to 3:00 PM Pacific time, but their offices are IN the Pacific Time Zone.

In less than 2 months of owning my new Replicator+ I have had 2 extruders fail after printing between 10 and 15 different parts. Although the staff is very helpful and friendly that wont buy me new extruders in the future once my 6 month warranty expires.
When the extruder is working correctly the parts turn out as expected. Unfortunately with all of my downtime for confirming the extruder wasn't working correctly (not to mention the filament that was wasted) then waiting for the shipment I wasn't able to use my printer 2 weeks out of the the first 2 months owning it. I'm very disappointed after paying a premium for one of the "Best" 3D printers available today that the extruder isn't more reliable

I attached a new extruder to my makerbot, it has less than 11 hours of use on it, it is now producing an error code for overheating. Makerbot won't replace the product because it was purchased over 6 months ago even though it shows 10.87 hours of use. Maybe instead of a 6 month timeframe you should put a warranty good for a certain amount of hours. I use this product at a school it's easier to buy more than one item at a time. Due to money and paperwork issues, but if I don't use the product immediately them the warranty is out of date. That's kind of an old system of the product has an hours used function..