Like many of you I’ve been binge-watching YT videos and pouring through forums on CNC routing and I’m amazed that Easel doesn’t get more credit and kudos. In fact, it gets bashed pretty often as being too basic or limited which I find amazing.
As far as taking line art in and translating it to toolpaths, it’s amazingly quick, easy, and effective. I do all of my design in Illustrator and import the SVGs. Within minutes I can bang out the toolpaths and get going. Major bit changes or cut settings are done simply with additional workpieces which you can name and spit out separate G-code files for. Easy.
Easel handles V-carving really well, and combinations of roughing + detail bits are really easy to do as well, and the results look great. You add an additional bit and it figures everything out really well.
I played with Maker for a while and found it unintuitive and tedious.
I’ve also spent a lot of time with Vectric products which I really like. For fine-grained control of every possible variable, Vectric is fantastic and though it looks like it is someone’s highschool Visual Basic 6 project, it really is quite nice to work with and I’ll eventually buy it to do stuff like v-carve inlays. Still though, I have a Mac which then needs Parallels (120/year) and a Windows license (150) to run.
For someone who is designing on Illustrator, working on a Mac, and needs a really user-friendly and powerful tool to create tool paths, Easel Pro is amazing.