PLA filament, ranked by £/kg
Plain PLA filament is the default for most printing: stiff, low-warp, prints cool on an open printer with a brass nozzle. It softens from about 55°C, so it is the wrong choice for anything left in the sun.
Guides
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Bed adhesion: what actually works
Glue sticks, hairspray, rafts, brims and expensive surfaces — an honest ranking of what fixes prints coming loose, starting with the free fix that solves most cases.
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Do you need a filament dryer?
Wet filament is real and ruins prints, but a dedicated dryer is not the only answer. How to tell if moisture is your problem, and what to do about it.
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Filament storage: dry boxes, vacuum bags and desiccant
Keeping filament dry is cheaper than drying it out. What actually works, what desiccant to use, and why the little sachet in the bag is already spent.
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First layer calibration, properly
Nearly every adhesion problem and half of all print failures start in the first layer. How to set Z offset by eye, and what a good first layer actually looks like.
What PLA filament is good at
PLA is the default filament for good reasons. It prints at low temperatures on an open printer, barely warps, holds fine detail, bridges well, and is the cheapest and most widely stocked material on the market. Nothing else is needed to run it: a standard brass 0.4 mm nozzle, a bed at 60 °C, no enclosure and no drying routine. If you are learning a printer, learn it on plain PLA — almost every failure you hit will be the machine rather than the plastic.
It is also stiffer than most people expect. For brackets, jigs, organisers, enclosure panels, prototypes, display models and anything that lives indoors and never gets hot, PLA is not a compromise choice. That stiffness is why a printed part often feels more solid in PLA than in a tougher, more flexible material.
Where plain PLA fails
Two weaknesses, both worth taking seriously. PLA softens from around 55 °C, so a part left on a car dashboard or a sunny windowsill through a summer will sag — the single most common disappointment with the material, and no print setting fixes it. And it is brittle: it snaps rather than bending, which makes it a poor choice for clips, hinges, snap fits and anything that takes a knock.
It is also a poor outdoor material. Sunlight and damp turn PLA chalky and weak over a season, and it offers little chemical resistance.
What to buy instead when PLA is the wrong fit
- It has to survive heat. PETG to roughly 75 °C with no enclosure needed; ASA or ABS to roughly 100 °C, both of which do need one.
- It has to bend rather than snap. PETG for a part that should give a little, TPU for one that genuinely has to flex.
- It lives outside. ASA, which is UV-stable.
- It just needs to be a bit tougher, printed the same easy way. The toughened blends sold as PLA+ or PLA Pro, which print almost identically to standard PLA.
If the choice is between the first two, PLA versus PETG works through it in detail.
Settings to start from
Nozzle 195–215 °C, bed 55–60 °C, cooling fan at full. PLA likes cooling — it is one of the few filaments where more airflow reliably improves overhangs and detail.
If your printer is enclosed, run PLA with the door open. Trapped heat softens the filament in the cold end and causes jams, which is the opposite of what an enclosure does for every other material here — see enclosed versus open-frame.
Buying: what actually differs
Between mainstream brands at similar prices, the meaningful differences are diameter tolerance and winding quality. A tightly wound spool with ±0.02 mm tolerance gives fewer failed prints than a loosely wound ±0.05 mm one, and that is worth a small premium. Colour and packaging are not.
Silk, matte and glow variants cost more because of the additive. Glow-in-the-dark in particular is abrasive and will wear a brass nozzle — see hardened versus brass nozzles.
PLA absorbs moisture more slowly than most filaments, so casual storage is survivable. It is not immune, though: a spool left open for months in a damp room will start popping and stringing. See filament storage.
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.