Way back, my friend lent me is CR-20 to see if I would like a printer. He had me download Cura slicer. The slicer was nice and easy to use. The printer was not… Lot’s of tweeking and missprints.
Now that I have my CR-6 SE (self leveling feature, houray) I installed the slicer that came with the printer. and so far no problems.
So now, I am wondering, why would I want another slicer et which one?
Hey, I likely don’t have enough experience to really answer this. My observations are simple, use what you like and know. Everybody (generally speaking) is quick to jump on the next best software. They fumble around with it never really getting a handle on the software before moving on the the next.
My feeling is pick one and use it enough to get to know it if you can get it to work the way you want a newer and ‘better’ one you might spend a long time getting to know it and it mayn’t really be better just ‘easier to use’ if you didn’t know something else.
Some times the ‘devil you know’ is the best. The fact there is not a single title that most use is an answer in itself. If one was way different and better than all the rest it would be the clear choice. There isn’t.
I like Prusa Slicer. It is what I used first, it works well for me so there is not need to switch.
Creality slicer is just an old build of Cura. I know it can seem enticing to use the one provided explicitly by Creality, but I’d switch to Cura. I can’t speak to PrusaSlicer because I’ve only tried it a handful of times but like @kitedemon said, better the devil you know.
Cura is the best free slicer for FDM, no equal I have found. Used Creality, came with machine, Prusa good but confusing, Simplify3D, costly but not updated. Lots of others but Cura is updated regularily and adds great features.
So you get more options with cura then creality, but theres still the inability to connect directly to the printer and enter raw gcode to use as calibration tools, at least to my knowledge, so I use multiple slicers,
Cura
Repetier host
And once in a awhile creality slicer
I was talking with a colleague and she uses Ideamaker. She really like it. It might be worth looking at for anyone fed up with what they are using now. I have never tried it personally.
There is a control option in Cura, however I’m not sure if it works that way. If I really wanted to issue raw gcode to my printer I’d just use Pronterface. Or Prusa slicer, because you know there’s no real reason not to have multiple installed.
That’s why I installed repetier, it has a raw code interface as well