Can Printables Catch Thingiverse? Growth Analysis Suggests a Long Road Ahead

I did some projections on the growth of Thingiverse and Printables to see which one could become the biggest 3D model repository.

Thingiverse was the original 3D model repository — for printable 3D models. There were plenty of 3D model repositories before Thingiverse, but they were mainly focused on models for visual applications, not 3D printing. 3D printing requires fully solid 3D model files, whereas many visual 3D assets are not.

Because of that and the early start in 2009, Thingiverse became the go-to place to share 3D models by the growing 3D print community. It rapidly grew, quickly hitting 1M 3D models, and kept going.

But then Thingiverse’s owner and operator, MakerBot, was sold off to Stratasys. Thingiverse’s development slowed considerably, and it was largely in a holding pattern for many years afterwards. Only recently has the current owner, UltiMaker, made some changes to improve the site.

Frustration with Thingiverse grew over time, and resulted in several competing sites emerging. However, most of them failed or faded away. It’s quite challenging to attract designers and users, as many found when launching 3D model ventures.

A few were successful, and the most successful was Printables from Prusa Research. This repository has the backing of one of the largest 3D printer manufacturers, making it stronger than most.

Prusa Research has done considerable work to refine the Printables site and it’s today among the easiest to use. It has a huge and growing number of 3D models available for download.

But have they caught up to Thingiverse? Thingiverse has millions of 3D models, and in spite of the aforementioned issues, is still growing.

I’ve been tracking the model counts on both sites for some time and I’ve prepared a bit of an analysis of their respective growth curves.

As of January of this year, Thingiverse held something close to 6,464,961 3D models, an enormous number. As of this writing they grew to 6,784,329. That’s a growth of 4.94% over nine months, or about 0.55% growth per month.

As of January of this year, Printables held something close to 748,156 3D models, a much smaller number. As of this writing they grew to 808,826. That’s a growth of 8.11% over nine months, or about 0.90% growth per month.

Printables is clearly growing faster than Thingiverse, but Thingiverse had an enormous head start.

Will Printables overtake Thingiverse at some point? They inevitably will, if the growth rates hold the same. When will that be?

I ran the numbers and it turns out it’s not soon at all. At these monthly growth rates, Printables would exceed Thingiverse’s total in … 2080 with 23.5M 3D models.

That’s 56 years from now.

That far in the future is entirely unpredictable and the question is really moot. At that point we won’t even be using 3D printers, as we’ll probably some type of AI-powered magic nanotechnology that can instantly produce any object on demand long before 2080. The need for a general 3D model repository will not be required.

What this analysis does show, however, is that in spite of the raging popularity of Printables, it will never overtake Thingiverse in terms of the number of 3D models.

Meanwhile, there are other competitors rising. Bambu Lab’s MakerWorld is also growing at a fast rate, and there’s no telling where this will end up years from now.