Anycubic Filament Guide: The Whole Range and How to Print It

Anycubic's filament range is 19 product lines, all 1.75 mm with a ±0.02 mm tolerance, all sold as 1 kg spools, running anywhere from 190 °C for PLA to 290 °C for polycarbonate — and 18 of the 19 carry an identification chip. Below is the whole lineup broken down from Anycubic's own datasheets: what each one is for, what temperatures to actually set, and which spools you can drop into an ACE Pro versus which ones have to be fed from an external holder.

Quick answer: which Anycubic filament for which job

If you don't want to read the whole thing, start here. Every family gets the full treatment further down, with the real datasheet numbers.

What every Anycubic spool has in common

• 1.75 mm, ±0.02 mm tolerance. An independent caliper check across several wraps of a PLA spool came out at 0.01 mm maximum deviation — so the spec sheet isn't padded.
• 1 kg spools only. Order "3 kg" and you get three separate 1 kg spools; Anycubic doesn't sell bulk rolls.
• Vacuum sealed with desiccant. This is the single most common piece of praise in owner reviews — spools genuinely arrive dry and printable.
• An identification chip (Anycubic calls it Intelligent Identification). The printer picks up type, color and remaining length by itself. ASA is the only line where the spec sheet says "Not Supported".
• Spool-less refills exist for three lines — PLA Basic, PLA+ and PETG. They mount on Anycubic's reusable spool, and compatibility with Bambu Lab, SUNLU and eSUN spools is claimed.
• Compliance. Anycubic publishes RoHS and REACH statements plus MSDS and TDS files for every line.

Core PLA: Basic, PLA+ and High Speed

These three do most of the work. The difference isn't really quality, it's character: Basic is the cheapest and most predictable, PLA+ is stiffer and takes an impact better, High Speed is tuned to push more plastic per second.

High Speed ties temperature directly to speed, and that's worth memorizing: 190-210 °C at 50-150 mm/s, 210-230 °C at 150-300 mm/s, and 230-260 °C at 300-600 mm/s. Run the hot profile slowly and you get blobs and stringing; run the cold profile fast and you get under-extrusion.

About that "up to 10x faster" claim on the High Speed box — Anycubic's own footnote is refreshingly honest. The 500 mm/s figure is compared against 50 mm/s standard printing, the test ran on a Kobra 2 Pro, and the data comes from Anycubic's lab "for reference only". We couldn't find an independent measured 500 mm/s test on this filament anywhere. The numbers that do show up in hands-on reviews: 300 mm/s outer walls on an enclosed Kobra S1, and a practical flow ceiling around 25 mm³/s on a Kobra 3 V2, which at 0.2 mm layers works out to roughly 350 mm/s.

Decorative PLA: Matte, Silk, Galaxy, Metal, Marble and Glow

Anycubic files these lines under "aesthetic filaments", and the datasheets back that up. Silk, for instance, bonds at only 12±4 MPa in the Z axis versus 26±1 MPa for plain PLA. Translated: that gorgeous Silk figurine splits along its layers about twice as easily.

Two practical notes. Silk and Silk Dual cap out at 8 mm³/s, the lowest flow figure in the whole range — you simply can't run them fast. And Marble and Metal both want a 0.4 mm nozzle or larger; at 0.2 mm the filler clogs the path.

PETG: the workhorse for functional parts

If PLA is about looking good quickly, PETG is about not breaking. Anycubic rates it at 52±1 MPa tensile, 45±2 kJ/m² impact (double PLA) and it holds shape to 69 °C. No enclosure needed, 60-70 °C bed is plenty. The trade-off is mandatory drying and a much fussier retraction setup.

PETG-CF is the toughest of all the PLA and PETG lines on impact: 60±4 kJ/m² against 45 for plain PETG and 22 for PLA — only ASA beats it, at 90 kJ/m². The cost is the carbon fiber itself — brass nozzles wear out within a few kilos, which is why Anycubic flatly requires hardened steel. One more quirk: the spec table says 65-70 °C bed, while the FAQ on the same page recommends 70-80 °C for adhesion. If parts lift, go higher.

Engineering filaments: ABS, ASA, PC and PLA-CF

This is where the printer matters more than the plastic. Anycubic only clears ABS, ASA and PC for the Kobra S1 series — they need 80-120 °C beds and a closed chamber. PLA-CF sits in this group for a different reason: no chamber required, but a hardened nozzle definitely is.

Choosing between ABS and ASA is easy: anything living outdoors gets ASA. Anycubic publishes its own heat comparison — ASA 90 °C, ABS 75 °C, PETG 63 °C, PLA 53 °C, measured differently from the HDT figures in the table above — and adds that ASA smells noticeably less and warps less. ASA has exactly one annoying drawback: it's the only line with no identification chip, so you'll be entering it into the ACE by hand.

Polycarbonate tops the range on strength: 65±6 MPa tensile and 110 °C heat deflection. The requirements match. It wants a 100-120 °C bed — which means on paper it doesn't even fit a Kobra 3 Max with its 90 °C ceiling — plus 8-12 hours of drying at 80 °C and a mandatory glue coat. In practice this is a two-machine material: Kobra S1 and Kobra S1 Max.

Flexibles: TPU 95A and TPU 68D

Anycubic sells two flexibles, and the difference that matters isn't softness — it's where you're allowed to load them. TPU 95A is softer and stretches to 697 % before it breaks, but it must never go into the multicolor unit. TPU 68D is harder (that's a Shore D rating), stretches 650 %, and was purpose-built for feeding through an ACE 2 Pro.

Anycubic's own TPU guide for the Kobra 3 series states the rule bluntly: 95A and harder can be printed, anything softer than 85A gets flattened by the extruder wheel and jams the path. Before loading TPU, back the extruder arm screw off half a turn counter-clockwise or the strand snags in the gears. And lay out one or two models per plate and print by object rather than by layer — with a flexible, all those travel moves turn into stringing.

The full table: all 19 Anycubic filaments

Compiled from Anycubic's official datasheets as of 20 July 2026. The drying column follows the manufacturer's wording: "required" means the sheet says Required, "advised" means Recommended.

What your particular printer can actually run

The limiting factor is almost always maximum bed temperature, not the hotend. Here's how the filament requirements line up against the current Anycubic printers in our catalog.

ACE Pro and ACE 2 Pro: what you can actually load

Anycubic's multicolor unit exists in two generations, and their approved material lists differ. That matters more than it sounds: half the "my printer eats filament" complaints are somebody loading something the unit was never meant to take.

What not to put in the unit, per Anycubic's own warnings and owner experience:

• TPU 95A and anything softer. Officially prohibited: the strand bends inside the channel. Owner reports of what actually happens — TPU wraps around the drive wheel and into the buffer, and digging it out takes anywhere from two hours to half a day.
• PLA Glow. Anycubic itself documents the clogging risk in an ACE Pro and recommends an external holder instead.
• PLA Matte — with an asterisk. The official ACE Pro FAQ says plainly that "compatibility limitations may affect the stability and consistency of print quality" and recommends a dedicated printer for matte filament. The cause is mechanical: the drive wheel has a smooth groove with no knurling, so it can't grip a rough surface. The community fix is orthodontic rubber bands stretched over the drive wheel grooves.
• Fiber-reinforced — ACE 2 Pro only. The first-generation material list doesn't include CF filaments at all. The ACE 2 Pro officially accepts PLA-CF, PETG-CF and PAHT-CF, but Anycubic warns that hard abrasive variants wear out the feed channel. If you print composites often, feed them externally.
• Cardboard and off-spec spools. The ACE Pro rejects small sample spools, lightweight cardboard ones and anything larger than spec.

A word on waste. Multicolor printing through an ACE always means purging: a 10.9 g Benchy on a Kobra S1 burned 183 g of purge, and a 312 g dragon produced 730 g of waste. The practical conclusion owners reach is the same every time — if a model splits into single-color parts, print the parts. It saves both filament and hours. Full breakdown in our ACE Pro multicolor guide.

Drying: temperatures and times

Anycubic ships vacuum-sealed with desiccant, and the first spool really does print straight out of the bag. Trouble starts two or three weeks after opening. The symptoms are unmistakable: popping and crackling at the nozzle, dull banding on walls, stringing where there was none, and visibly weaker layer bonding. The general method lives in our filament drying guide.

One caveat on flexibles. The TPU 95A datasheet calls for a full 70-80 °C dry-out, but Anycubic's own TPU guide gives a gentler routine for the unit: 50-55 °C for 4-6 hours in an ACE Pro or ACE 2 Pro. That's not drying from scratch — it's conditioning a spool before a print, and it makes a visible difference to stringing.

Build plates and adhesion

Anycubic ships three surfaces: the Cool Plate, smooth PEI and double-sided textured PEI. The official table pins down not just the temperature but the plate type — PETG, ABS, ASA and TPU must never go on the Cool Plate at all. The numbers below come from Anycubic's plate documentation; for PLA Matte it gives 45-60 °C against 60-65 °C on the product page, and for PLA Glow 50-60 °C against 60-70 °C. Take the low end for small parts and the high end for large ones.

Slicer settings worth changing

Three routes here. First, Anycubic Slicer Next — an OrcaSlicer fork, currently V1.4.1.2 as of 20 July 2026, with Anycubic presets built in. Second, OrcaSlicer: its repository carries 152 Anycubic filament profiles, last meaningfully updated in June 2026 when Kobra S1 Max support landed. Third, Cura and PrusaSlicer — and this is where it gets bleak: Cura has no Anycubic filament profiles at all, and PrusaSlicer has exactly one, for the ancient Mega Zero. General slicer workflow is covered in our OrcaSlicer guide.

Those are OrcaSlicer's stock profiles for a Kobra S1 with a 0.4 mm nozzle. The Kobra 3 numbers are noticeably different — PETG runs at 230 °C and 8 mm³/s there versus 250 °C and 12 mm³/s on the S1. Don't copy profiles between the two.

• Retraction lives in the printer profile, not the filament one: Kobra 3 uses 1 mm at 60 mm/s, Kobra S1 0.8 mm at 40 mm/s, Kobra S1 Max 0.4 mm at 30 mm/s, Kobra X 0.8 mm at 30 mm/s. The classic PETG mistake is carrying over 1.2-6 mm from a bowden machine; on direct drive, start at 0.4-0.5 mm and rarely exceed 1 mm.
• Max volumetric speed. The official limits are conservative. Community measurements put a Kobra S1 at roughly 23 mm³/s on PETG against the rated 12; around 20 mm³/s is a safe working figure.
• Cooling. Anycubic doesn't publish fan percentages — the datasheets list a "cooling time" per layer instead: 6 s for ABS and PETG-CF, 7 s for High Speed, 8 s for most PLA, 10 s for Galaxy and Marble. The bigger the number, the slower that layer should cool.
• Pressure Advance. Anycubic's typical values are PLA 0.02-0.06, PETG 0.04-0.1, TPU 0.1-0.3. On the Kobra 3 the OrcaSlicer profiles leave it disabled and let firmware handle it; on the S1 and X it's enabled in the slicer.

What to expect in practice: the good and the bad

Anycubic is a solid mid-tier brand: affordable, generally consistent, with noticeable batch-to-batch variation. Here's what multiple independent sources agree on.

• Good: the geometry is honest. A caliper check across several wraps came out at 0.01 mm deviation against a rated ±0.02 mm.
• Good: it arrives dry. The vacuum-and-desiccant packaging works, and reviewers say so constantly.
• Good: it runs on other brands' machines. One owner put 40+ Anycubic spools and 275 hours through a Bambu P2S without an issue. The chip only matters for Anycubic's own automation; elsewhere it just prints.
• Good: buyer ratings are high. Black PETG sits at 4.9 out of 5 across 2,249 reviews on Ozon, black PLA at the same 4.9 across 478.
• Bad: spool winding crossovers. This is the single most substantive complaint in owner reviews — a strand slips under the wrap next to it and the print stalls. In a multicolor unit it's fatal: there's no tension sensor and no firmware compensation.
• Bad: batch variation. An experienced printer running ten spools of PLA High Speed reported constant stringing, clogs and spontaneous strand snapping during idle time — while other owners run the same product without complaint. That's a raw-material consistency signature, not a design flaw.
• Bad: black and clear are the problem colors. Black PLA and PETG leave pigment on your hands and the part, and clear PLA gets called out repeatedly as the weak spot — uneven extrusion, and it turns grey after drying.
• Bad: the full range is hard to find outside Anycubic's own store. Marketplaces typically stock PLA, PLA+, PETG, ASA and Silk; PLA-CF, PETG-CF, PC, TPU, ABS and the decorative lines have to be ordered separately.

Common problems and where to go with them

• Stringing is almost always moisture or too hot a nozzle. Dry first, then drop temperature in 5 °C steps. Full write-up: how to fix stringing.
• ABS and ASA warping — enclosure, glue, and no drafts. See how to stop warping.
• Parts won't stick to the bed — usually Z-offset and a dirty plate rather than the filament: first layer guide.
• Clogged nozzle — typical after CF filaments or PLA Glow on brass: how to clear a clog.
• Thin or gappy walls — calibrate flow for the specific spool: under- and over-extrusion.
• Ghosting at speed — that's machine resonance, not the plastic: layer shifting and ghosting.
• Fumes from ABS and ASA — a health question, not a comfort one: ventilation and emissions.
• Machine-specific quirks — Kobra S1 known issues and Kobra 3 known issues.

Still choosing a printer to match your materials? Check the full Kobra lineup comparison. If you print resin, we have a separate Anycubic resin guide. And for brand-agnostic material theory, see our filament guide.

FAQ

Sources

• Anycubic filament catalog — datasheets for every line (temperatures, mechanicals, drying, ACE compatibility)
• Anycubic Wiki: filament guide — official build plate types and the PLA Glow warning
• Anycubic Wiki: TPU printing on the Kobra 3 series — why TPU can't go through an ACE and how to feed it externally
• Anycubic ACE 2 Pro and ACE Pro — approved material lists, drying modes, spool requirements
• OrcaSlicer repository — stock Anycubic filament profiles under resources/profiles/Anycubic
• r/anycubic — owner experience with the ACE Pro, TPU, matte filament and spool winding
• Bambu Lab forum: results with Anycubic PLA — running Anycubic filament on a non-Anycubic machine