Nexa3D Challenges Markforged with Cost-Effective Onyx Alternative: Xyon

Nexa3D announced a rather interesting material: Xyon.

Xyon seems to be a nylon material that’s reinforced with chopped carbon fiber, making it suitable for a variety of engineering and end-use applications.

The interesting part is that Xyon is billed as a “drop in replacement for Onyx”. Onyx is the flagship material of rival 3D printer manufacturer Markforged, which introduced the material several years ago. It’s gained a reputation as a strong and practical material for many applications. Markforged currently offers several variants of Onyx, including flame resistant and ESD versions.

Nexa3D isn’t — yet — offering variants of Xyon, but one can guess they will in the future.

How close is Xyon to Onyx? Nexa3D explains:

“Designed as a one-to-one, drop-in replacement material for Markforged Onyx 3D printing filament. Use the same settings on your Markforged printers to print Xyon filament at a fraction of the cost.”

Even the product’s name, “Xyon”, is reminiscent of “Onyx”: the same letters, only in a different order.

In the online Nexa3D materials store, the official product title is not just “Xyon”, instead it’s: “Xyon – Alternative to Markforged Onyx, 1.75mm”.

But what about the cost differences? Nexa3D offers a 750g spool of Xyon is listed at US$97.50, or US$130/kg.

Markforged, on the other hand, will sell you an 800g spool of basic Onyx for US$190, or about US$237.50 per kg. That’s quite a bit more than the price of Xyon. Xyon seems to be about 45% less expensive than Onyx.

How has Nexa3D made this move? It’s likely that it’s a side effect of their recent acquisition of Essentium, a maker of industrial FFF devices. Essentium focused hard on engineering materials in order to address the needs of industry, and succeeded. Their materials capability no doubt helped Nexa3D develop Xyon.

This is quite an interesting move by Nexa3D, and strikes directly at a rival. Onyx is very well known for its capabilities and is one of Markforged’s most popular products.

It may be that Markforged may have to drop the price of Onyx to compete, should Xyon prove to be as identical as billed.

Competition is good!

Via Nexa3D and Markforged