Twenty-five head-to-head comparisons, each one a pair people genuinely stand in front of and have to choose between.
The list is deliberately capped. Thirty-five materials could be crossed into nearly six hundred pairs, and almost all of those pairs are questions nobody asks — nobody is deciding between PEEK and glow-in-the-dark PLA. Generating them all would produce hundreds of pages that answer nothing, which is a worse outcome than having fewer pages.
What each comparison covers
The same structure every time, because a comparison is only useful if you can find the row you care about:
- the honest one-line summary of when each one wins
- the measurable differences, side by side: density, temperatures, shrinkage, strength, heat resistance, outdoor life and price
- what changes in practice on the machine — enclosure, drying, nozzle wear, bed surface
- the specific situations where the answer flips
The pairs worth knowing before you read any of them
PLA against PETG is the most common decision in the hobby, and the answer is usually PETG for anything functional and PLA for anything decorative or dimensionally fussy.
ABS against ASA is not really a strength question. They print almost identically and have similar mechanicals; ASA survives sunlight and ABS does not, and that is most of the decision.
Any filled material against its unfilled base is a stiffness-and-warping trade against nozzle wear and impact resistance. The fibre is usually bought to stop the part warping rather than to make it stronger, which is not how it is marketed.
When a comparison is the wrong tool
If you are choosing a material from a requirement rather than from a shortlist — "it has to survive a car dashboard in summer" — start with the material selector instead. It works backwards from the constraint and hands you a shortlist, which is a better shape of answer than a two-way comparison you picked before knowing what you needed.
How the pairs were chosen
Three tests. Do people actually stand in front of these two and have to choose? Do they differ in a way that changes the decision, rather than in a way that only shows on a data sheet? And is there a situation where the answer flips, so the page has something to say beyond naming a winner?
A pair that fails all three does not get a page. That is why there are twenty-five comparisons rather than several hundred, and why the twenty-five are the ones people search for.
Where the numbers come from
Every comparison reads its figures from the same material records as the rest of the site, so a comparison and the two material pages behind it cannot disagree with each other. If a density or a temperature range is corrected in one place it is corrected everywhere at once.
The subjective parts — which one to pick, and when — are written per pair rather than generated, because "it depends" is only useful when someone spells out what it depends on.