Marlin VS OctoPrint

Compare Marlin vs OctoPrint and see what are their differences.

Marlin

Marlin is an optimized firmware for RepRap 3D printers based on the Arduino platform. Many commercial 3D printers come with Marlin installed. Check with your vendor if you need source code for your specific machine. (by MarlinFirmware)

OctoPrint

OctoPrint is the snappy web interface for your 3D printer! (by OctoPrint)
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Marlin OctoPrint
755 223
15,874 7,984
1.0% 0.8%
9.8 7.0
1 day ago 8 days ago
C++ Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Marlin

Posts with mentions or reviews of Marlin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-26.
  • Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    There is _a lot_ wrong with Marlin. It is a complex codebase, full with ancient artefacts, litterred with preprocessor ifdefs every 2-3 lines of code, dynamic includes in the middle of CPP files, etc[1]. It's about as unreadable as C++ code gets--well, I guess it's not template metaprogramming.

    Klipper by contrast is a breeze to read through[2].

    I am very grateful for Marlin, for all of reprap, and everyone who has contributed to it. But saying there is nothing wrong with it is straight up misguided.

    [1]: https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/blob/bugfix-2.1.x/M...

    [2]: https://github.com/Klipper3d/klipper/blob/master/src/lcd_hd4...

  • E steps way off.
    1 project | /r/ender3 | 6 Dec 2023
    I think you are mistaken. I can't speak for implementations preceding the Ender 3 V2, so what you're saying may have been true at some point for other machines. However, here you can see Marlin developers confirm that there is an EEPROM on the stock E2V2 board using diagrams from Creality and photographic confirmation. Here is the datasheet for the EEPROM. Here is a thread discussing this Marlin release, and also the then-recent release of official Creality firmware which resolved the same issue. Since the stock firmware is based on Marlin, and at the time Marlin did not support this type of EEPROM, the EEPROM was not usable at launch. Any mainstream firmware (official or third-party) from the last three years will be using the onboard EEPROM unless the user intentionally specified otherwise.
  • FYI: Marlin 2.1.2.1 on Sapphire plus v2
    1 project | /r/TwoTrees | 26 Sep 2023
    pull latest Marlin from github: https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin
  • Ender 3 Pro + Octoprint = Thermal Malfunction, system stopped! Heater_ID: E0
    1 project | /r/Ender3Pro | 25 Aug 2023
    Also, checked the following discussion but seems like I need to update the firmware to be able to comment that like right? Temperature variance monitor tweaks by zeleps · Pull Request #23571 · MarlinFirmware/Marlin · GitHub
  • Marlin DACAI Screen Bug
    1 project | /r/ender3v2 | 6 Jul 2023
  • Anycubic Kobra Marlin 2.1+ based custom firmware
    4 projects | /r/anycubic | 30 Jun 2023
    i spent some time and successfully rebased Kobra 2.8.2 OG firmware from an unknown Marlin ~2.0.8 frankenstein to a clean latest (as of now) release (not bugfix) 2.1.x -- v2.1.2.1 + 1 commit
  • Digraphs and Trigraphs
    3 projects | /r/arduino | 28 Jun 2023
    As an example, check the macropocalypse in Marlin - but the actual trigger for me to start was Reprap firmware doing a floating point divide in interrupt context while targeting AVR8 core…
  • Need advice on intermittent thermal runaway (Ender 3 V2)
    1 project | /r/FixMyPrint | 27 Jun 2023
    Any change of thermistor or to a PT100/PT1000 will require recompiling the firmware, because every type has different characteristics. Marlin uses an internal table to calculate the temperature for whatever reading it gets from the CPU's analogue-to-digital converter. It has many tables for different thermistors, but only one is ever incorporated at compile time. So you have to specify which type you're using. You can see the commonly-used types in the list in Marlin's Configuration.h file, in the section headed // @section temperature. The tables themselves are in Marlin/src/module/thermistor.
  • Marlin ramps1.4
    1 project | /r/AnetA8 | 23 Jun 2023
  • Has anyone actually edited Marlin source code and added a new feature?
    1 project | /r/MarlinFirmware | 22 Jun 2023
    FWIW It IS open source but the GNU General Public License v3.0 rules apply. https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/blob/bugfix-2.1.x/LICENSE

OctoPrint

Posts with mentions or reviews of OctoPrint. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-05.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Marlin and OctoPrint you can also consider the following projects:

MKS-TinyBee - MKS TinyBee is a mainboard for 3d printing, based on ESP32 module

mainsail - Mainsail is the popular web interface for managing and controlling 3D printers with Klipper.

SKR-2

moonraker - Web API Server for Klipper

klipper - Klipper is a 3d-printer firmware

octo4a - Use your old Android device as an OctoPrint server.

Marlin-2.0.X-MKS-Robin-Nano - Marlin 2.0.X for the MKS Robin Nano 1.1/1.2

BIGTREETECH-SKR-mini-E3 - BIGTREETECH SKR-mini-E3 motherboard is a ultra-quiet, low-power, high-quality 3D printing machine control board. It is launched by the 3D printing team of Shenzhen BIGTREE technology co., LTD. This board is specially tailored for Ender 3 printer, perfectly replacing the original Ender3 printer motherboard.

Ender-3 - The Creality3D Ender-3, a fully Open Source 3D printer perfect for new users on a budget.

Marlin - Marlin is an optimized firmware for RepRap 3D printers based on the Arduino platform. | Many commercial 3D printers come with Marlin installed. Check with your vendor if you need source code for your specific machine.