Ask anyone who regularly uses a Cricut what could be done to improve the experience and you typically hear one answer over all of the others. It’s a great machine with cool software, but it could be faster. Cricut’s Explore 3 introduced a way to create faster than the competition, without losing quality or precision in the process. Cricut’s line of Smart Materials is vast but pricey and doesn’t cover the full breadth of what these cutting machines are capable of. 

With the new and somewhat obviously named Cricut Explore 4, the speed and accuracy previously available only to Smart Materials now exists with whatever you feed it. Best of all, this new machine is now one of the most affordable on the market. 

It has always been easier to show what a Cricut cutting machine does than describe it to someone in one short sentence. It’s one of the most endearing qualities of this category of gadgets, the limitations are rarely hardware-based. The best places to see this for yourself are either your local farmer’s market or Etsy, where you will find clever people who have used a Cricut to make everything from custom labels for handmade candles to elaborate decorations to be ironed on to shirts and jackets. With Cricut’s excellent and constantly improving Design Space app and just about any of the cutting machines in its lineup, you can do make some very cool things with little to no previous experience. 

Out of the box, it would be surprising if you could tell the difference between a Cricut Explore 4 and the model released nearly four years ago. Aside from the new, richer color of the outer plastic and the label on the cutting apparatus, the visible parts of this machine is all but identical. The good news is a price drop did not come with a drop in hardware quality — this machine still feels plenty sturdy and cuts just as smoothly as its predecessor. But if you’re looking for a whole lot of new functionality or a ton of new features, you will not find them here. If you own a Cricut Explore 3, you more or less already own a Cricut Explore 4 in terms of what it can cut and how the software interacts with this new machine.

Cricut’s big claim with the Explore 4 is speed, specifically with anything that isn’t branded Smart Materials. You will find “up to 2X faster” with a big asterisk next to it on Cricut’s website, with that asterisk indicating that the performance increase is compared to the Explore 3. To test this, I put the same quantities of paper, vinyl, sticker paper, glitter cardstock and iron-on material into an Explore 3 and an Explore 4 to test performance. In every test, the Explore 4 was clearly faster than the Explore 3, but only with the vinyl was the performance nearly at that twice-as-fast mark. 

Faster is obviously better, especially if you’re using a Cricut as part of a small craft business, but the impressive thing here is the retention of quality. Cricut is able to ensure a certain level of quality at speed with its Smart Materials because it’s all manufactured by Cricut, which means the precise tolerances can be programmed in. It’s why Smart Materials can be cut to spectacular lengths without using a cutting mat and with no damage to the machine. 

In all the tests I have performed with the Explore 4, I can find no evidence of quality loss between Smart Materials and third-party products. And if you invest in the longer, 24-inch cutting mats you can cut twice as much with a single set of instructions with that same level of quality.

At $250, Cricut’s new Explore 4 is available for the same price you can get an Explore 3 for most days. That’s incredible, considering the Explore 3 has been available for almost four years and has only recently started seeing significant discounts during shopping events. It makes this machine not only easy to recommend among its limited competitive set but easy to recommend as the best Cricut machine to either get you started on a new crafting journey or as the best upgrade path if you own a previous generation.