Design Studio vs Craft Room

[AzCatmom]

I'm a little confused. I was considering getting the Cricut Design Studio, but it's pretty expensive. Now I've seen information on their Craft Room, which is supposidly free. What is the difference between the two?

 

[morgansmom2000]

Craftroom is a free online program. Design Studio you have to buy. I have Design Studio (I've had it for years, got it free when I bought a certain number of cartridges one time) and I'm used to it. BUT, it has some serious limitations. Provocraft has the tendency to move onto the next big thing and forget about fixing the problems with their initial projects. Design Studio has pretty much gone that way.

I was one of the "chosen few" who got to try Craftroom before it opened up to everyone, and have been using it pretty regularly. I like it, but it still has a lot of bugs. It has more capabilities than CDS, but sometimes freezes up and gives errors. I'm having problems because we got a new computer and the Craftroom isn't playing well with Windows 7 and PC says it's my anti-virus software and can't help me...

So, long story short - try Craftroom for free. You have to download the program (instead of using the web-based one) in order to cut, but it's straightforward to download and install.

One thing that some people didn't like was that by saving their projects online, Provocraft in essence owned them. You can export them to your own PC and delete them from the PC site, if you don't like PC owning them.

HTH!

 

[ariamac]

I never bought Design studio... I played around with the trial a little while ago (never cut with it) and meh...

I have been using Craftroom now for a couple weeks and I LOVE IT! I love the versatility of welding shapes together, hiding contours of shapes... organizing your cuts on the mat... and the list goes on.

I don't have any cartridges with mittens... but I was still able to cut a pair!

I did this by welding shapes together... I used an outline of a fish, added another small oval for the thumb and moved them around a bit until I liked how it looked.

I think they look like a great pair of mittens and now I can save the file for next time I need to cut mittens!

I also love that you can link your cartridges to it and you can cut from like 5 cartridges all on the same mat, without having to switch the physical cartridges out of the cricut!

Craftroom is a great tool and so far I have very much enjoyed using it!

 

[Reddy]

if you have great internet - go with the craftroom
my understanding is they aren't adding the new carts to CDS & are not going to update or fix any of the problems with it

 

[morgansmom2000]

if you have great internet - go with the craftroom
my understanding is they aren't adding the new carts to CDS & are not going to update or fix any of the problems with it

Phooey! I wouldn't mind so much if the Craftroom worked with my PC!