Quick-reference for the everyday FDM filaments — what each one is genuinely good at, where it fails, and the printer conditions it demands. Specialty and novelty materials live in 📝Novel & Exotic 3D Printing Filaments.

Choosing Fast

The decision collapses to four questions. Does the part need to survive heat or sunlight? Does it need to bend without breaking? Does it need to hold a load or take impact? Does it need to look good more than it needs to work? PLA answers only the last one well. Everything else in this list exists because PLA fails one of the first three.

PLA

The default, and correctly so. 📝PLA is a bioplastic derived from corn, sugarcane, or tapioca rather than petroleum, prints at low temperature, and releases fewer irritating fumes than the alternatives.

Good for — prototypes, display pieces, miniatures, anything decorative. Best surface finish of the common materials, widest color range, cheapest, most forgiving. Prints on an open-frame printer with no enclosure.
Bad for — anything in a hot car, anything outdoors, anything structural. Softens near 60°C, which a parked dashboard exceeds routinely. Brittle under impact, and it becomes more brittle with UV exposure over months.
Conditions — 190–220°C nozzle, 50–60°C bed, no enclosure, no drying required for fresh spools.

PLA+ / PLA Pro

Toughened PLA with impact modifiers blended in. Keeps the easy printing and adds meaningful impact resistance, at slightly higher temperature and cost. Heat resistance barely improves — the 60°C ceiling still applies. Worth defaulting to over plain PLA for any part that will be handled rather than displayed.

PETG

The practical middle ground and the real answer to "PLA broke, now what."

Good for — functional parts, outdoor use, containers holding liquid, anything needing a bit of flex before failure. Handles roughly 75–85°C, resists UV and moisture well, and is food-safe in the raw material sense though layer lines still harbor bacteria.
Bad for — fine detail and clean overhangs. Strings badly, and its stickiness fights bridging and supports. Layer adhesion is excellent, which cuts both ways: supports fuse to the part and fight removal.
Conditions — 230–250°C nozzle, 70–85°C bed. No enclosure needed, but keep it dry — PETG absorbs moisture faster than PLA and prints with popping and bubbles when wet.

ABS

The legacy engineering plastic, now largely displaced by ASA and PETG for hobby work.

Good for — heat resistance around 100°C, machinability, and acetone vapor smoothing to a glossy layer-line-free finish. Still the cheapest way to a truly smooth part.
Bad for — anything printed on an open frame. Warps and delaminates aggressively without a stable ambient temperature, and it emits styrene, which means ventilation is not optional.
Conditions — 230–260°C nozzle, 90–110°C bed, enclosure effectively required.

ASA

ABS reformulated for the outdoors. Same strength and heat resistance, same enclosure requirement, but genuinely UV-stable rather than merely weather-tolerant. If a part lives outside permanently, this is the answer. Slightly easier to print than ABS and slightly more expensive.

TPU / TPE (Flexible)

Rubber-like elastomers sold by shore hardness — 95A is stiff and easy, 85A is soft and difficult, below that requires a well-tuned direct-drive extruder.

Good for — gaskets, phone cases, vibration dampers, tires, hinges, anything that must compress or stretch and return.
Bad for — speed and precision. Prints slowly, typically 15–30mm/s, and Bowden setups struggle because the filament compresses in the tube instead of advancing.
Conditions — 210–230°C nozzle, 40–60°C bed, direct drive strongly preferred, and dry it before use.

Nylon (PA)

The toughest common option, and the fussiest.

Good for — living hinges, gears, bushings, and anything needing abrasion resistance and genuine toughness rather than brittle stiffness. It bends far before it breaks.
Bad for — casual use. Nylon is hygroscopic to an extreme degree, pulling enough moisture from ambient air in hours to ruin a print. It requires active drying during printing, not just before.
Conditions — 240–270°C nozzle, 70–90°C bed, enclosure, and a dry box feeding the extruder.

Polycarbonate (PC)

The strongest and most heat-resistant of the accessible materials, holding above 110°C and taking real impact. It also demands the most: very high nozzle temperatures, a hot enclosure, and rigorous drying. Most consumer printers cannot reach its requirements without modification. PC-ABS and PC blends trade some performance for far easier printing and are usually the better practical choice.

Carbon Fiber & Glass Fiber Composites

Chopped fiber blended into a base polymer — most commonly PETG-CF, PA-CF, and PLA-CF. Fiber adds stiffness and dimensional stability while reducing warping, at the cost of brittleness and a matte, slightly rough surface. Every fiber-filled filament is abrasive and destroys brass nozzles within a spool or two, so a hardened steel or ruby nozzle is mandatory. Note that carbon fiber is electrically conductive; use glass fiber where that matters.

Support Materials

PVA — dissolves in plain water. Expensive and extremely moisture-sensitive, but the only clean option for PLA-temperature multi-material work.
BVOH — dissolves faster and more completely than PVA, at higher cost.
HIPS — dissolves in limonene, pairs with ABS at similar temperatures, and is cheap enough for large support volumes.

Polypropylene (PP)

Chemically inert, fatigue-resistant, and nearly impossible to make stick to a bed. Excellent for living hinges and containers holding aggressive chemicals; miserable to print without a PP-specific build surface. A specialist choice, not a general one.

At a Glance

Assessment

For most work the honest answer is a two-material shelf: PLA+ for everything that looks like a prototype, and PETG for everything that has a job. That covers the overwhelming majority of prints and avoids the enclosure question entirely. Add ASA only when something must live outdoors, and TPU only when something must flex — both are purchases driven by a specific part, not by general readiness.

Nylon and PC are worth resisting until a part genuinely demands them. Both fail in ways that look like printer problems rather than material problems, which means the first several failures get misdiagnosed and the real lesson arrives late. The moisture sensitivity is the hidden cost in both cases: the material is not hard to print so much as hard to keep dry, and that is a storage and equipment problem rather than a slicer-settings problem.

The most common mistake is reaching for an exotic material when the actual failure was geometry. Wall count, infill pattern, and print orientation change part strength more than a material upgrade does, and they cost nothing.