Switching brands

Overview

If you already have a tablet and are looking to buy a new one, you might be thinking about switching brands. For example you might have a Wacom and are entertaining moving to Huion or XP-Pen. This document will give you some things to consider. There are valid reasons to switch brands but there are risks.

Wacom tablets

Wacom tablets will come up in this discussion a lot. The thing to remember with Wacom is that your should treat their professional and consumer pen tablets as completely different experiences.

• Wacom professional tablets are the best in the market.

• Wacom professional pens are the best in the market.

• Wacom consumer tablets are just OK (some are pretty good)

• Wacom consumer pens are just OK (some older ones are pretty good)

Moving from Wacom professional tablets

If you already have a Wacom professional tablet, switching to another brand is unlikely to give you a better experience in terms of drawing performance.

Physical pressure range (IAF and MAX pressure)

As of 2026 Wacom professional pens still have the lowest IAF in the industry. And this means that they can detect extremely low pressure. Other brands have gotten close but are still over the years but are still not matching what walk on professional pens offer. so we've sensitivity.

So if having a pen that is extremely sensitive to pressure is what is important to you - a pen that detects very light strokes - then you may not enjoyed the transition to another brand and its pens.

More here: Professional pens compared

Old Wacom vs New non-Wacom

Wacom has been in the industry for 40 years. And they've released many tablets over the years.

Welcome's older professional tablets are still better then the newest tablets of other brands. Yes the differences have really shrunk. And for a lot of people you would not be able to tell the difference.

Some Wacom consumer tablets are not great

Some Wacom consumer pen tablets I really do NOT recommend. These include:

• Wacom One S (CTC-4110WL)

• Wacom One M (CTC-6110WL)

If you have these tablets and their pens, you might get a better experience with a newer non-Wacom pen tablet

Age of tablets on the market

At any given moment welcome only produces a small number of tablets. And they don't release new products very often. This means their lineup is relatively simple to understand.

Welcome tablets have a support lifetime of about a decade. And they can be used for a longer time than that. There were people using Wacom tablets from 2 decades ago - for example an Intuos 3. This is a series of professional talents that was released in 2012.

Non Wacom brands release a lot of products. And you can find a confusing mix of their older products and their newer products both available for sale now. This runs the risk of you purchasing an older tablet which won't be as good compared to their newer tablets.

Probably the easiest way of knowing that you're getting a newer non Wacom tablet is by checking when YouTube reviews start appearing and verifying that they're using their newer models of pens.

For non Wacom brands here are the pens that indicate that these are newer tablets with the latest technology.

• Huion PW550, PW550S

• Huion PW600 series

• XP-Pen X3 Pro

• XP-Pen X3 Elite

• XP-Pen X4

Drivers

Tablet drivers are critical for successfully using a drawing tablet.

There has never been a clear pattern where a specific brand had a better talent driver than others. The experiences of people seem to vary.

For some people, welcome tablet drivers are very reliable and don't give any problems at all. This has been my experience. However for others Wacom drivers have been very flaky.

And the same can be said for any other brand of drivers.

So if you're expecting a better driver by switching brands then it is certainly possible. But don't assume it's true.

Mixing tablets and drivers on the same machine

You might have a tablet from Wacom let's say a pen tablet like an Intuos pro. And then you might be interested in also getting a pen display from a non-Wacom brand such as a Huion Kamvas.

What a lot of people hope is that they can use both tablets at the same time with your computer. By same time I don't mean that they're literally drawing with two hands.

What I mean is that people expect to be able to connect both tablets to their computer and then if they want to draw with their pen tablet they can and if they need to use their pen display from another brand they can switch to that one. The desire to do this totally makes sense.

However having drivers from different brands installed on your computer may not work.

For Windows it almost certainly will not work. On windows it's best to have a single driver running at one time. For some reason on windows tablet drivers tend to conflict and cause problems with each other. Some people get around this by installing both drivers but going through a process of disabling 1 driver when they want to use the other tablet.

On MacOS, my experience has been very different it seems like tablet drivers get along much better when multiple are installed. In fact my experience has been very good doing this. But for other people they find that mixing tablet drivers on Mac OS is also a problem.

Moving to Wacom

If you have a non-Wacom tablet and want a Wacom tablet, if you go for an Wacom Professional tablet there is one thing you need to be aware of.

Wacom professional pens tend to be much more expensive than non-Wacom pens. Some Wacom professional pens are more expensive than non-Wacom tablets! So you should be aware of the prices of getting a replacement pen if you lose or damage it.

Specific recommendations

Go here for my recommendations that include non-Wacom tablets: recommendations