The Cricut Maker 4 is the top-tier machine in Cricut’s smart cutting lineup — the one that’s meant to replace an X-Acto knife, a rotary cutter, a scoring board, and a stack of stencils all at once. It’s a desktop cutting plotter: you design or import a shape in Cricut’s Design Space software, send it over Bluetooth or USB, and the machine drags a small blade (or pen, foil tool, engraving tip, or one of thirteen total compatible tools) across material clamped to a sticky mat or fed directly as a “Smart Material.” Cricut says the Maker line applies roughly ten times the cutting force of their base Explore machines, which is what lets it get through leather, thin wood, and chipboard rather than just vinyl and cardstock.
The 4 generation is specifically a speed bump over the Maker 3 — Cricut lists it as up to 2x faster, with a cutting speed around 10 inches per second on both axes and 100 ips acceleration. It’s rated to cut 300+ materials at thicknesses up to about 2.4mm. The bigger practical change is the Smart Materials system: certain vinyl, iron-on, and specialty papers are pre-sized to feed straight into the machine with no cutting mat at all, and can run in continuous cuts up to 12 feet long, which is a real time-saver if you’re doing multiples of the same design. For the first time, Cricut is also bundling some tools and sample materials plus a mat in the box, so you’re not starting from absolute zero on unboxing. It launched at $399.99 — a bit cheaper than the Maker 3’s $429.99 debut price.
Using it day to day is genuinely approachable — Design Space (available as a desktop app and a mobile app) walks you through mat placement, material selection, and blade depth with enough hand-holding that first-time users get a clean cut on attempt one more often than not. Where the shine wears off is the ecosystem around it. Cricut’s own materials — vinyl sheets, iron-on, printable sticker paper — cost meaningfully more than generic third-party equivalents, and if you want the full Design Space font and image library rather than just your own uploads, that’s a $13.99/month or $139.99/year subscription on top of the machine itself. None of that is unusual for the category, but it adds up fast if you’re a casual crafter rather than someone running an Etsy shop.
Physically it’s also not a small machine — it needs real desk real estate, more than the compact Cricut Joy or even the Explore line, so it’s not something you casually pull out and put away for a five-minute project.
Tool-wise, the roster is what actually justifies the “Maker” name over Cricut’s cheaper Explore line: alongside the standard fine-point blade you can swap in a deep-point blade for thicker material, a rotary blade for fabric, a knife blade for basswood and heavier stock, plus scoring wheels, a debossing tip, an engraving tip, and foil transfer tools — thirteen tool types in total across the ecosystem. Design Space also supports Print Then Cut, where you print a full-color design on a regular inkjet printer and the machine reads registration marks to cut precisely around it, which is how a lot of sticker-sheet projects actually get made. The software runs as a free download on Windows and Mac as well as iOS and Android, so the subscription gate is specifically about content (fonts, images, ready-made projects), not about the core cutting functionality itself — you can absolutely use your own artwork without ever paying Cricut a monthly fee.
Pros
- Up to 2x faster than the Maker 3, with real cutting-force headroom for thicker/tougher materials like leather and balsa wood
- Compatible with 300+ materials and 13 tools (cutting, writing, foiling, scoring, engraving, embossing, perforating)
- Smart Materials let you skip the cutting mat entirely and run continuous cuts up to 12 feet
- Design Space software is genuinely beginner-friendly with built-in tutorials
- First Maker generation to include bonus tools and sample materials in the box at no extra cost
Cons
- Full Design Space library (fonts, images, projects) requires a $13.99/mo or $139.99/yr subscription
- Cricut-branded consumables (vinyl, iron-on, sticker sheets) cost noticeably more than generic alternatives
- Large footprint compared to compact Cricut models — needs dedicated desk space
- Best value is realized by frequent crafters or small sellers; occasional users may not justify the ongoing costs
- Tied to Cricut’s ecosystem and app — not a general-purpose plotter for arbitrary software workflows