ABS keycaps are made from Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene and are the most common keycap material used. They are used on both affordable and high-end keyboards because they are cheaper and easier to produce. There are thousands of ABS keycap sets on the market, most of which are very inexpensive, although there are also premium and much more expensive ABS keycap sets that can cost as much as a premium mechanical keyboard.

There isn’t one. Keycaps are entirely up to preference, if you haven’t tried other keycap materials or profiles, I’d suggest trying a cheaper keycap set and see if you like it, I found that way that I love the cherry profile but don’t really care for XDA. What are pudding keycaps? PBT has a few colour options but they’re usually not vivid bright colours that you can find on ABS caps. PBT is more prone to warping and bending on larger keycap sizes PBT is considered to be superior in terms of feel, robustness, and looks. The price is slightly higher than ABS, however we, alongside pretty much the whole mechanical keyboard community, think that the price is worth it.PBT plastic is also a type of thermoplastic but, unlike ABS, it has a semi-crystalline structure. It's strong and more heat resistant than ABS, and can be mixed with other materials in the manufacturing process to produce unique traits.

ABS keycaps are the standard which everyone is familiar with, if you had a pre-built computer growing up, it almost certainly had an ABS keyboard. This early impression of ABS keycaps are what gave it its initial reputation. Cheap, will fade, and generally undesirable.

PBT keycaps also show remarkable resilience in the presence of UV lights, heat, and other chemical substances. ABS is a softer plastic and produces a milder, softer sound. PBT is harder and produces a more tactile sound. Neither is better, it’s up to preference, but there are a lot of fans of the sound a premium ABS keycap like GMK produces. ABS will have more vibrant colour options If you’ve found this post then you’ve reached the stage of “what keycaps do I get” of the mechanical keyboard hobby. PBT keycaps are made from Polybutylene Terephthalate and are known to be one of the strongest and best quality plastics to use to make keycaps. PBT is a thermoplastic engineering polymer that is rigid and can handle a lot of abuse for years. Because this thermoplastic is in high demand in the automotive industry, there is not an endless supply of it, resulting in higher costs that can make it too expensive to be sold with a keyboard. PBT is brittle, so shaping it into keycaps is complicated and requires a very expensive tooling process that can only be used for one keycap set design. This means if you want to produce a PBT keycap set for a US layout, you will need to spend the same amount of money to develop completely new tooling for a UK, German, or French layout.