StitchBuddy 4+

Should be 5 stars, if only...

StitchBuddy is capable and generally well designed. It does what it claims to do, and it is remakably easy to use. Developer support is amazingly fast and helpful, a feature that you don't see until after you've bought the program and one that is much appreciated.

Keeping my rating from being five stars, however, is that the program should be able to recover from attempting to read a corrupted file. The first file I tried to load after downloading StitchBuddy happened to be a corrupted VP3 file. StitchBuddy gave no indication that anything was wrong except a silent failure to display the file's window. Further attempts to read known-good files failed in the same way. I had to quit the program and relaunch it to read good files. Please fix this bug.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your feedback. StitchBuddy's capabilities to read / write embroidery designs are limited by vendors not sharing details of proprietary file formats. For Pfaff / Husqvarna machines it is really a shame, but I couldn't reverse-engineer these files good enough to support VIP / HUS files at all, and VP3 can only be read. Unfortunately there is little I can do about it. I'd love to further investigate the corrupted file, because under normal conditions StitchBuddy is handling errors quite gracefully. Maybe you'd like to provide it to my support email address (info@...).

Perfect solution to my dilemma

StitchBuddy has been the perfect tool for me to use. I’m just getting started in the world of embroidery and, at this stage, have no need to create my own designs. What I do need, however, is a way to combine and/or modify existing designs. I also want to do that on a Mac. StitchBuddy provides exactly what I need at a reasonable cost.

Program support has been fantastic. I was attempting to combine 3 layers of appliqués and delete stitches that would be under one or more layers. What I was doing wasn’t working so I emailed the developer and got an almost immediate response. He asked for screen shots and the design file I was attempting to modify so I sent them then went to bed. When I got up this morning (Christmas Eve!) I found an email explaining why what I was attempting wasn’t working as well as the modified design file — a delightful early Christmas present.

I highly recommend StitchBuddy for combining and modifying existing embroidery designs. I felt comfortable with the GUI and was able to learn what I needed for the task at hand. Support from the developer could not be better. Thanks, Matthias and Fröhliche Weihnachten.

A lot of bang for little $

As a Mac user there is not many embroydery programs out there for our use. This program solves that problem. It does many of the things that the more expensive MAC embroydery program does but at a much cheaper price. The many features (ability to see thumbnails of your designs, ability to rotate, resize, change thread color, print with template features, of which I have just named a few are all that many machine that a machine embroydery user would need. On top of all that it also allows you to convert designs from one platform to another.
The developer is super responsive to questions. He answers super quickly (usually within a few hours) and adds new features from time to time.
I cannot say enough about this program other than it is worth every penny that it costs (and the cost is not that much for all that it does.)

Developer Response ,

Thank you so much 😊