After publishing “Alternatives to Thingiverse, 2024 Edition”, I wondered which printable 3D model repositories were most popular.
There’s really no official way to tell, as the usage data is private to the companies providing the services. Also there’s the problem of what it means to be “most popular”. Does that mean the most models? The most views? Downloads? Uploads? Users? Active users? Active users in the past 30 days?
You get the idea, it’s hard to define a way to answer this question. I’m going to use Google Trends, which is a surrogate for general interest. Google provides relative data charts of search counts for submitted search terms, and this could be a proxy for “interest”. The idea is that a service would be more popular if more people are searching for it.
Then there’s the question of which services would we investigate? There are 35 services on our list, but not all of them should be investigated.
Some are services that mix 3D printable content — the stuff we are interested in here — and visual 3D content for games, movies, etc. Others are bolted into 3D tools that would make trend analysis difficult. Their popularity in search wouldn’t be representative.
Others are meta search tools: they don’t offer 3D models themselves, but instead provide search services for other repositories. Perhaps we’ll look at them separately.
After filtering down our list, we have these 17 to analyze:
- 3DKitBash
- Creality Cloud
- Cults 3D
- DayInLA
- embodi3D
- Gambody
- Hum3D
- MakerOnline
- MakerWorld
- MyMiniFactory
- NopSCADlib
- Pinshape
- Printables
- RedPah
- Thangs
- Thingiverse
- Threeding
- YouMagine
Even that is too many, so I did some pre-analysis and removed the ones that were so small they would just clutter up the chart. The remaining to be analyzed were:
- Creality Cloud
- Cults 3D
- Gambody
- Hum3D
- MakerOnline
- MakerWorld
- MyMiniFactory
- Pinshape
- Printables
- Thangs
- Thingiverse
- YouMagine
But Google Trends only allows a maximum of five on the chart, so let’s boil it down to the top five:
- Cults 3D
- MakerWorld
- Printables
- Thangs
- Thingiverse
And here’s the Google Trends worldwide chart of those five for the past year:
It turns out that Printables and Thingiverse are massively larger — in search interest — than all the other printable 3D model repositories. At the bottom of the chart you can see a crush of the other three, MakerWorld, Thangs and Cults 3D. Two that didn’t quite make the cut, MyMiniFactory, Creality Cloud, were just below this group, while the others were far lower.
Makeronline, Anycubic’s new repository, just launched and its search counts are low. However, because of the company’s prominence it’s likely it will grow large in the future. However, it’s still small now so we excluded it from the top players.
In the chart, the green line leading the pack is Thingiverse, still the champion (if measuring search interest) after 15 years of existence. There’s a notable spike in searching around the holiday period, likely those receiving gift 3D printers looking for something to print. There doesn’t seem to be a trend whereby Printables would overtake Thingiverse, as the two march in sync, more or less, for the past year.
MakerWorld (red line), Bambu Lab’s 3D model repository, is rapidly growing in interest, but is still so new that it is still quite low on the chart. You can see how it appears out of nowhere in 2023 and then grows larger.
Cults 3D (blue line) and Thangs (yellow line) seem pretty flat, yet with a healthy amount of searches taking place.
For fun, let’s look at the next five by themselves, which would appear almost flat on the main chart above. These are the next five:
- Creality Cloud
- Gambody
- Hum3D
- MyMiniFactory
- Pinshape
And here’s the chart. Remember that this would all be squished down into a blurry line at the bottom of the top five chart:
MyMiniFactory (green line) seems quite steady and popular, while Creality Cloud (blue line) is seeing steady growth. Perhaps Creality Cloud will eventually hit the top five, but they have a long way to go. The other three (Gambody, Hum3D and Pinshape) seem to be clustered at the bottom with much lower results.
But what about the meta services that search for 3D models? Let’s take a quick look at their trends:
Of the three (Yeggi, STLfinder and 3DMDB) Yeggi is the clear leader over STLfinder, with 3DMDB not even registering. How big are they compared to the services themselves? Let’s add MakerWorld and see what happens:
It seems that MakerWorld has only recently overtaken Yeggi, suggesting that a fair number of people use Yeggi for finding 3D models.
What can we conclude from this analysis? I believe there are several important takeaways:
- Printables and Thingiverse are far and away the most popular sources for 3D models
- Other parties wishing to catch up to them will almost certainly take many years to do so, if they ever do
- There’s huge importance to being first: Thingiverse has held the lead even though it has been mostly unchanged for years and disliked by many in the 3D print community
- Aside from MakerWorld, these five were basically flat for the past year, suggesting there is little growth in their services
Which is the best printable 3D model repository? For me, it’s the one that has the model I want.
