I have a cricut that I got when they first came out, long before they even had the silhouette. I liked it at first when I was doing a lot more regular scrapping especially for alphas. Then my MIL and SIL got the silhouette and now I have silhouette envy. I have a fair amount of money invested in the cricut (the machine, cartridges, software etc.) that I can't justify getting a silhouette right now. So in my humble opinion, get the silhouette. Even though it seems expensive up front, you can cut true type fonts and download images to cut with out having to buy extra software and/or cartridges. One thing I hate about the cricut is that you have to buy a whole $49-$89 cartridge just to get one image even if you don't want/care about the other on it
