PLA+ (PLA Plus) filament, ranked by £/kg

PLA+, PLA Plus, PLA Pro: what the plus means

PLA+ — sold interchangeably as PLA Plus, PLA Pro, PLA Tough, PLA Max and a dozen other suffixes — is a toughened version of the same base polymer, with additives that improve impact resistance and bonding between layers. The important thing to understand about the name is that there is no standard behind it. Each manufacturer mixes its own recipe and calls the result PLA+, and nobody is obliged to publish what is in it or what it changes.

What the plus reliably buys you across brands is better impact resistance and noticeably stronger layer adhesion, so parts fail by bending or crushing rather than splitting cleanly along a layer line. That matters more than raw tensile numbers: layer adhesion is usually what decides whether a printed bracket survives being dropped.

What the plus does not mean

It is not a heat upgrade. PLA+ softens at much the same temperature as standard PLA, somewhere around 55 °C, so it is still the wrong material for a car interior, a sunny windowsill or anything near a heat source. If heat is the problem, PETG or ASA is the answer and no grade of PLA will be.

Nor is it a different material to print. It needs no enclosure, no hardened nozzle and no change of build surface. Anyone comfortable with plain PLA filament can run PLA+ on the same printer the same afternoon.

When the premium is worth paying

For parts with a job to do — brackets, mounts, handles, tool holders, anything that gets picked up and dropped — usually yes. The gap over standard PLA tends to be modest, and toughness is exactly the property those parts need.

For display models, figures, draft prints and prototypes, the extra buys you nothing you will see. A sensible habit is cheap standard PLA for everything visual and PLA+ for everything functional. Compare today’s figures above against the ranking on the plain PLA page — when the gap is small, there is little reason not to default to the toughened version.

Settings to start from

Usually 5–15 °C hotter than the same brand’s standard PLA — commonly 210–230 °C, bed 55–65 °C, standard brass nozzle, open frame. The additives that improve toughness generally need a little more heat to flow properly, and running PLA+ at PLA temperatures is a common cause of poor layer bonding in a material bought specifically for good layer bonding.

Cooling can usually stay high, though backing the fan off slightly helps strength. The manufacturer’s own printed range beats anything here, and with PLA+ that matters more than usual, because the range reflects a recipe only they know.

Buying notes

Because the formulation is proprietary, results vary more between brands than they do with standard PLA, and the same spool colour from the same brand can behave differently between production batches. If a particular PLA+ works well for you, there is a real argument for staying with it rather than chasing the cheapest per-kilo figure in any given week.

Treat “PLA+” on a listing as a claim rather than a specification. A brand that states a Charpy or Izod impact figure, or at least says what the additive is for, is telling you more than one that only puts a plus on the label.

How to read this table

The per-kilo column is the only number that compares listings honestly. A spool sold at 40% off can still be poor value, and a multi-spool bundle looks expensive until you divide by its total weight. We count bundles at their full weight, so a 4 × 1 kg pack and a single 1 kg spool sit on the same scale.

Where a listing does not state a usable weight we leave the per-kilo figure blank rather than guessing — a wrong ranking is worse than a missing one.