Differences between Sixxiz Big Shot, Brother ScanNCut and Silhouette Cameo

Nowadays, there are different available machines for us to help us with our handicraft. Today we’re going to talk about three of them and compare them since there’s a lot of questions about them. In this post, we hope to clear up your doubts about which one to buy: the Sizzix, the Silhouette or the Brother ScanNCut.

The Sizzix Big Shot is the best-known pressing tool on the market, very useful for cutting a wide variety of materials such as paper, cardboard, EVA rubber, acetate, fabric, leather, balsa wood... The limitation of this machine is that we need dies to be able to work with it. Although there is a great variety of models and designs in the market, we’re limited by them, and we can’t create our own customized dies. We can use any of the Sizzix dies as well as those of compatible brands with our machine. On the other hand, the biggest advantage is that it allows us to emboss, something we can’t do with any of the other two other tools machines we’re comparing with.

The Silhouette Cameo (or Silhouette Portrait, in a smaller version) is a more advanced machine in terms of cutting style. You can design through the Silhouette Studio program on your computer and send your custom drawing to your Silhouette machine to be cut. You can cut a lot of materials like paper, vinyl, cardboard, fabric, foam, acetate...

It also has a unique functionality, "print and cut". With this option, we can use our home printer to print our drawings or designs to, later, cut them perfectly with our Cameo.

Then it came another machine, the ScanNCut from Brother. Custom designs, scan-ability... A real wonder of tool that allows us to cut previously scanned drawings on our fabric, foamy, leather...

Through its USB port, we can send our scanned images or patterns to the computer and our custom designs to the machine. To work on this last part of the design, Brother provides a web application from which to work comfortably and transfer our files to .fcm format. This is the Brother ScanNCut Canvas.

Another question you ask us a lot is if you can use Silhouette America branded vinyl and transfer films with the ScanNCut. Of course, they are compatible, the Brother printer cuts the vinyl perfectly and you can have the full range of Silhouette America colours in your projects.

As you can see, each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. None is perfect and they all complement each other. That's why the question arises, which one should I buy? Which tool suits me best?

So, we recommend you to think about the materials you’d like to use and the size of your projects, and then, choose a machine according to your needs.

If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach us, we’ll be delighted to help you.