Anycubic announced the Kobra 4 this week, and my first reaction was the same one I suspect a lot of Kobra X owners and prospective buyers had: wait, what? The Kobra X launched just a few months ago, earned strong independent reviews, solved a genuinely interesting problem with its integrated ACE Gen 2 multi-colour system, and is still in its early retail window. Now there is a Kobra 4, with an almost identical build volume, identical print speed specs, and a price that overlaps with the machine that just launched. The question is obvious: why?
This post is an attempt to answer that question honestly, compare what the two machines actually offer, and work out whether there is a logical buyer for each of them or whether Anycubic has just made their own lineup harder to navigate without a particularly good reason. The community appears to be asking the same thing — more on that below.
What the Kobra 4 actually is
The Kobra 4 is a fresh Anycubic FDM bed-slinger with a 260 × 260 × 260 mm build volume, a maximum print speed of 600 mm/s, a recommended speed of 300 mm/s, and a hardened steel 0.4mm nozzle as standard. On those specs alone, it is identical to the Kobra X. Same build plate. Same speed envelope. Same nozzle spec. The machine is available in two configurations: the base Kobra 4 (single colour, no multi-colour system included) and the Kobra 4 Combo (with one ACE 2 Pro unit included, enabling four-colour printing).
Pricing has not been fully confirmed at the time of writing — the Kobra 4 page is a pre-launch announcement collecting email signups for early bird pricing. What Anycubic has confirmed is the core specs and the critical architectural difference from the Kobra X.
The architectural difference: this is the whole story
The Kobra X’s headline feature — the one that earned Tom’s Hardware’s Editor’s Choice and drove the community excitement — is the ACE Gen 2 system integrated directly into the toolhead. The cutter sits 10mm from the nozzle. Filament only retracts 30mm during a colour change. Colour swap time averages 35 seconds versus 90+ seconds on competing systems. Purge waste is reduced by 81.25% compared to conventional multi-colour setups. This is what makes the Kobra X interesting and what distinguishes it from the Bambu AMS approach we covered in the Kobra X post.
The Kobra 4 does not have this. The primary difference lies in the print head configuration: Kobra 4 Combo does not feature ACE GEN 2. Kobra X Combo includes a more advanced configuration. The Kobra 4 uses the older ACE 2 Pro external box system — the same technology available on the Kobra 3 and Kobra S1. This is not a new multi-colour architecture. It is the existing one, bolted onto a new machine body.
The consequence for multi-colour performance is direct and significant. Without ACE Gen 2’s 10mm cutter-to-nozzle distance, the Kobra 4 Combo has a longer filament retraction path during colour changes. That means slower swaps, more purge material per change, and a multi-colour printing experience closer to what the Kobra X was specifically designed to improve upon. The Kobra 4 Combo is capped at 8 colours maximum — reaching 8 colours requires an additional ACE 2 Pro and one 8-colour filament hub. The Kobra X with four ACE 2 Pro units expands to 19 colours.
Head-to-head specifications
| Specification | Anycubic Kobra X | Anycubic Kobra 4 Combo |
|---|---|---|
| Build volume | 260 × 260 × 260 mm | 260 × 260 × 260 mm |
| Max print speed | 600 mm/s | 600 mm/s |
| Recommended speed | 300 mm/s | 300 mm/s |
| Max acceleration | 20,000 mm/s² | 20,000 mm/s² |
| Multi-colour system | ACE Gen 2 — integrated into toolhead | ACE 2 Pro — external box (same as Kobra 3/S1) |
| Cutter-to-nozzle distance | 10 mm — very short purge path | Longer — conventional external path |
| Native colours (base) | 4 — no external box needed | 1 (base) / 4 with included ACE 2 Pro (Combo) |
| Maximum colours | Up to 19 with 4× ACE 2 Pro | Up to 8 with 2× ACE 2 Pro + hub |
| Purge waste reduction | 81.25% vs conventional systems | Standard ACE 2 Pro — higher purge than Kobra X |
| Colour swap speed | ~35 seconds average | Higher — longer retraction path |
| Nozzle (included) | 0.4mm hardened steel | 0.4mm hardened steel |
| Camera | 720p — AI monitoring | 720p — AI monitoring |
| Noise (silent mode) | ≤45 dB | ≤45 dB |
| Connectivity | Dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4G/5G) + LAN | Wi-Fi + LAN |
| Slicer | Anycubic Slicer Next + OrcaSlicer compatible | Anycubic Slicer Next + OrcaSlicer compatible |
| Enclosure | Open frame | Open frame |
| Base price (Combo) | ~$299 / £259 (standard retail) | TBC — pre-launch at time of writing |
The confusing lineup question
Here is the thing I cannot quite work out: who is the Kobra 4 Combo for?
The buyer who wants the best value four-colour printing at this price point is better served by the Kobra X. It has the more advanced multi-colour architecture, faster colour swaps, significantly less purge waste, and expands further. The buyer who wants single-colour printing on a budget has the base Kobra 4 — but the Kobra X base (single colour, no ACE unit) exists at roughly the same price point and has the better toolhead when they later want to upgrade to multi-colour. The buyer who wants four colours and already owns an ACE 2 Pro from a previous Kobra machine — that is the most charitable reading of the Kobra 4’s positioning, but Anycubic’s own page acknowledges that the old ACE Pro is not compatible with the Kobra X, which is part of what created the demand for a machine that uses the older system.
There are a couple of cases where the Kobra 4 Combo makes some sense. If it launches at a meaningfully lower price than the Kobra X — which is possible and would explain the positioning — it represents a budget path to four-colour printing for buyers who do not need the Kobra X’s superior purge efficiency. For casual four-colour users printing modest complexity models with few colour changes, the difference in swap time and waste between ACE Gen 2 and ACE 2 Pro may not be significant enough to justify a higher purchase price. The Kobra X’s waste and speed advantages are most dramatic on prints with many colour changes — under 50 swaps, the gap narrows considerably.
But that is a narrow and somewhat ungenerous use case, and it requires the Kobra 4 to land at a noticeably lower price than the Kobra X to make the trade-off logical. If it arrives at the same price — or close to it — the Kobra X wins on every meaningful multi-colour metric and the Kobra 4 Combo is simply the less good version of the machine Anycubic launched three months earlier.
This is the same confusion Anycubic created with the Kobra 2 series in 2023, when they launched four machines simultaneously with overlapping specs and required a detailed comparison table to explain the differences. We understand that many people might get confused about these models. Anycubic’s own words. The Kobra series has a history of proliferating models that compete with each other as much as they compete with rival brands. The Kobra 4 is the latest entry in that pattern.
What the community is saying
The Kobra 4 announcement is recent enough that independent reviews do not yet exist. But the community response to the announcement page and Anycubic’s FAQ has been pointed. The most consistent observation: the Kobra 4 Combo’s own product FAQ directly compares it to the Kobra X and acknowledges the Kobra X has the “more advanced configuration.” It is unusual for a manufacturer’s own product page to steer buyers toward a different product in the same lineup, but the FAQ’s candour about the difference at least answers the question directly rather than burying it.
The Yahoo Tech review of the Kobra X, published within the same week as the Kobra 4 announcement, described the Kobra X as by far my favourite printer among six or more machines owned, and praised its four-colour out-of-the-box experience at $299. The review makes no mention of the Kobra 4, which suggests it landed after the review was filed. That timing alone captures the awkwardness of the situation: the Kobra X has not yet finished its review cycle and the machine that partially overlaps it is already announced.
Where the Kobra 4 might make sense
The charitable reading, and the one that Anycubic is presumably working from, is that the Kobra 4 is a deliberate step-down product to serve a price point below the Kobra X. If the base Kobra 4 lands at $199–$229 and the Kobra 4 Combo at $269–$289, there is a logical gap between the two products. The Kobra 4 Combo would become the budget four-colour option and the Kobra X the performance four-colour option, separated by a clear price difference and a clear capability gap. That is a defensible lineup.
There is also a backward compatibility case. Buyers who already own an ACE 2 Pro unit from a Kobra 3 or S1 cannot use it with the Kobra X — the old ACE Pro is not compatible with the Kobra X. The Kobra 4, which uses the ACE 2 Pro, would let those users pair an existing ACE unit with a newer printer body rather than starting from scratch. This is a real use case, even if it is a niche one.
Until pricing is confirmed and independent reviewers get hands-on time, the Kobra 4 is difficult to assess with confidence. The specs it shares with the Kobra X do not tell you how it performs in practice, and the multi-colour architecture it uses is known quantity — the ACE 2 Pro is a well-understood system whose limitations relative to ACE Gen 2 are clearly documented.
My take
The Kobra 4 announcement feels premature. The Kobra X has been in the market for a matter of months and its defining innovation — the ACE Gen 2 integrated toolhead — has not had time to fully establish itself in the community’s collective experience. Announcing a machine with a less advanced multi-colour system at the same build volume and speed spec while the Kobra X is still in its launch window creates confusion in the lineup that Anycubic will have to work to explain rather than letting the products speak for themselves.
If I were in the market for a second printer today and the Kobra 4 were confirmed at a meaningfully lower price than the Kobra X, I would still lean toward the Kobra X. The ACE Gen 2 architecture is the specific reason the Kobra X is interesting — the 10-hour time saving on complex prints, the 81.25% waste reduction, the 35-second colour swaps. That capability does not disappear because Anycubic has now launched a machine that does not have it. If anything, the Kobra 4’s existence makes the Kobra X’s architecture look more deliberate and differentiated than it might have seemed when positioned only against the Bambu A1.
The printer I am still actually waiting for from Anycubic is one that combines the ACE Gen 2 efficiency of the Kobra X with a larger build volume. The Kobra 4 is not that machine, and neither is the Kobra X. Until that exists, the Kobra 4 announcement is an interesting product strategy decision that raises more questions than it answers.
The Kobra 4 is available for email pre-registration at store.anycubic.com with early bird pricing to follow. The Kobra X is available now at $299 / £259 from the same store. Pricing for the Kobra 4 Combo had not been confirmed at the time of publication — this post will be updated when it is.
