General info

This article is also available in following languages: 

Welcome to PrusaSlicer documentation (PrusaSlicer manual)

PrusaSlicer (formerly known as Slic3r Prusa Edition or Slic3r PE) is our own in-house developed slicer software based on the open-source project Slic3r. PrusaSlicer is an open-source, feature-rich, frequently updated tool that contains everything you need to export the perfect print files for (not only) your Original Prusa 3D printer.

PrusaSlicer is available for Windows, Mac and Linux

History

The Slic3r project was born in 2011 within the RepRap community as an effort to provide the growing 3D printing technology under the leadership of Alessandro Ranellucci an open-source slicer. Slic3r spread among users quickly. When Josef Prusa was looking for a leading slicing software for Original Prusa printers the choice fell on Slic3r. It was (and still is) an open-source and very powerful software. 

Jo and Alessandro in 2012 (video interview)

However, as Prusa Research was growing (very, very, very fast), we needed to be more flexible with the slicing software development. We needed to make changes to the software, and the changes had to be done asap. We also needed to add more features. At this point the co-operation with the detached original Slic3r team was unsustainable. The bottom line is that we decided to establish a fork of the original Slic3r project.

Slic3r Prusa Edition was released in November 2016 – read more about the launch here. A dedicated team of full-time Slic3r PE developers was established and new functions were being added rapidly. These changes culminated in May 2019, when we released a new version with a major UI overhaul under a new name - PrusaSlicer 2.0. 

Why the name change? First of all, the old name was really confusing. Even in our own materials, we often didn’t include the “PE” suffix, and the community used Slic3r and Slic3r PE pretty much interchangeably. New users could mistakingly download Slic3r and wonder why it looks different from the screenshots in the 3D Printing Handbook and why it’s not configured for their Prusa printer. Speaking about the original Slic3r: with each update, Slic3r PE was moving further and further away from its original code. We’ve rewritten all of the Perl source code into C++ and especially with the 2.0 update, there were so many differences that it seemed appropriate to make the name more distinct.

Of course, it’s still open-source and you’ll find everything on our GitHub. And we’re still proud that our slicer is based on the original project written by Alessandro Ranellucci! Both projects now happily coexist and new features are frequently merged between one and another.