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 considering moving to Huion or XP-Pen. This document covers some things to consider. There are valid reasons to switch brands, but there are also risks.

Wacom tablets

Wacom tablets will come up in this discussion a lot. The key thing to keep in mind with Wacom is that their professional and consumer pen tablets are 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 drawing experience.

Physical pressure range (IAF and max pressure)

As of 2026, Wacom professional pens still have the lowest IAF in the industry, meaning they can detect extremely light pressure. Other brands have gotten closer over the years but still don't match what Wacom professional pens offer in terms of sensitivity.

If having a pen that is extremely sensitive to pressure is important to you — one that detects very light strokes — you may not enjoy the transition to another brand.

More here: 2025 Professional pens compared

Old Wacom vs new non-Wacom

Wacom has been in the industry for 40 years and has released many tablets over that time.

Wacom's older professional tablets are still better than the newest tablets from other brands. The gap has shrunk significantly, and for many people you would not be able to tell the difference.

Some Wacom consumer tablets are not great

There are 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, you might get a better experience with a newer non-Wacom pen tablet.

Age of tablets on the market

At any given moment, Wacom produces only a small number of tablets and doesn't release new products very often. This makes their lineup relatively simple to understand.

Wacom tablets have a support lifetime of about a decade, and can often be used even longer. Some people are still using Wacom tablets from two decades ago — for example the Intuos 3, a professional series released in 2012.

Non-Wacom brands release a lot of products, and you can find a confusing mix of older and newer models both available for sale at the same time. This runs the risk of purchasing an older tablet that won't be as good as their newer ones.

The easiest way to know you're getting a newer non-Wacom tablet is to check when YouTube reviews started appearing and verify that they feature the brand's latest pen models.

For non-Wacom brands, here are the pens that indicate a tablet uses 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 showing that a specific brand has better drivers than others — experiences vary widely from person to person.

For some people, Wacom tablet drivers are very reliable and cause no problems at all. That has been my experience. However, for others, Wacom drivers have been very unreliable.

The same can be said for any other brand.

So if you're hoping for better drivers by switching brands, it's certainly possible — but don't assume it.

Mixing tablets and drivers on the same machine

Say you have a Wacom pen tablet like an Intuos Pro and you're also interested in getting a pen display from a non-Wacom brand like a Huion Kamvas.

Many people hope to use both tablets with the same computer — not literally drawing with two hands at once, but being able to switch between them depending on what they're doing. That makes total sense.

However, having drivers from different brands installed on the same computer may not work.

On Windows, it almost certainly will not work. It's best to have only one tablet driver running at a time on Windows, as tablet drivers from different brands tend to conflict with each other. Some people work around this by installing both drivers and manually disabling one when they want to use the other tablet.

On macOS, my experience has been quite different — tablet drivers tend to coexist much more reliably. My own experience with this has been very good. However, some people find that mixing tablet drivers on macOS also causes problems.

Moving to Wacom

If you have a non-Wacom tablet and want to switch to Wacom, and you're considering a Wacom Professional tablet, there is one important thing to be aware of.

Wacom professional pens tend to be much more expensive than non-Wacom pens. Some Wacom professional pens cost more than entire non-Wacom tablets. Be aware of replacement pen prices in case you ever lose or damage yours.

Specific recommendations

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