The better your printer, the less this matters (in my experience). I just bought a couple spools of matte PLA from Michael’s, the craft store. Legitimately really nice quality filament for about 20% less than a higher end spool. I was shocked 😂

in my experience brand filament was less hassle to print with.

I bought cheapo noname filament a couple of times from different manufacturers and it was very hit and miss.

Worst case was I fiddled with printer settings for 6hours, drying it multiple times and many failed prints. Then I put in bambu filament and it printed perfectly with default settings.

But best case was just as good as the expensive stuff.

So you have to know yourself how much the gamble is worth it to you, what your frustration tolerance is etc.

You can generally trust dodgy rolls of ordinary PLA. For anything with special properties like sparklies, purported fiber fills, a metallic sheen, etc. all bets are off. You are equally likely to just find yourself with a spool chock-a-block full of randomly sized nozzle clogging particles of who knows what, or a roll of what turns out to be perfectly ordinary boring PLA and a set of product photos with a high degree of Photoshop polish.

I likewise don’t trust knockoff spools of engineering materials like Nylon, polycarb, etc. at all. Food for thought: Polycarbonate at PET in their natural states are both startlingly transparent, both are bendy-bendy, both have near identical melting points, and are equally annoying to print. PET is significantly cheaper than polycarbonate, though. So guess how easy it would be to spool up 1 kg of PET, slap a label on it that says “polycarbonate,” and sell it to the unwashed masses who are by majority unlikely to actually whack any test samples of the stuff with a hammer? Et. cetera.

So it is likely to be with purported PLA blends like “tough” PLA or “pro” PLA or “plus” PLA from the no-name brigade. These are often just regular PLA with a 30% markup.

Never forget the time honored Chinese pastime: 能骗就骗.

And this is going to sound stupid, but specifically beware of spools of nameless red filament. I don’t know if it has something to do with the pigment they use or what, but the only spools of any material I have consistently had embrittlement issues with have all been red.

Usually, plastic is plastic, but it really depends on what you’re printing.

If all you are printing is a block with no overhangs, few stop/starts, one color, etc. then it really doesn’t matter much.

Anytime the printer has to retract and start a new spot, that’s where stringing, blobs, and gaps can form.

You can do a test print with the cheaper plastic, like benchy, and then you can adjust your printer’s settings for the roll. There are also some smaller test prints if you want to test specific things, like a temperature tower, overhangs, etc.

Buy one, try it out, and see what happens. But don’t be surprised if you have to fiddle with some settings like speed or temperature to get good results.

What makes the quality is the exact composition of the plastic (additives, color pigments), the consistency and accuracy of the diameter along the filament and how dry it comes out of the bag.

Bad composition could be very bad for bed adhesion and make the filament unusable.

Bad diameter will cause mostly visual quality defects

Humidifier will cause bubbles and strings, can be fixed by drying the filament.

Back when I started I ended up with some very poop quality filament that I paid way over priced ! Nowadays I have the feeling the cheep stuff is pretty good after some drying. At least as far as PLA goes.

Brands mean a lot less than people think. Most brands are just relabeled filaments. A couple phone calls and you to can have your own brand of filament. Nor are there aren’t that many make lines in the world. And the base stock comes from an even smaller handful of manufacturers.

I have yet to meet a filament that I couldn’t get to print decently, and I have a very low taste in filaments. The cheapest of the cheap! Some of them took extra effort, but in the end I got what I wanted from them.

IME consistency across batches is almost the most important thing. Some brands print better than others, but none is best across all types. I have 3-4 different brands that I have dialed in and trust to perform the same every time and I stick to those. Buying cheap aliexpress filament is a crapshoot every time, even when sticking to the same brand. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it shortens your life by a decade due to frustration.