For the first time, "should I buy a tufting gun?" has a genuinely new alternative. Craftphilia, which just ran a successful Kickstarter, calls itself the world's first fully automated tufting machine: upload an image, load your yarn, and a CNC-style gantry tufts the rug for you — no handheld gun, no learned technique, on a work area expandable up to 70×140 cm.
We make handheld tufting guns, so you'd expect us to dismiss this. We won't — automation is real, it's interesting, and for a specific kind of maker it may be the right call. But "automated" and "handheld" are answering two different questions, and buying the wrong one wastes several hundred dollars. Here's the honest breakdown.