Silhouette Cameo 4....
Cricut is so so , 2 of my Neighbors have them and both said the same thing after the 30 free trail period ends the machine sometime will cut and sometime will not cut something they have made before.
While Cricut supports SVG right out the box , The Silhouette basic supports PNG , DXF and of course studio3 , Upgrade to the silhouette is a one time pay and not a monthly fee like others are. I run the business class edition which was on sale for 50.00US.
Now I can use pretty much any programs file. AI, EPS, SVG, DXF, PNG and a few others.
My neighbor noted that the Cricut while great for simple designs struggles with complex cuts like I make on the Silhouette Cameo 4.
On a side note he shelved the Cricut and bought a Silhouette and in the 2 weeks he has had it has been able to produce more stencils and vinyl stickers then he did the year and a half he had the Cricut.
As far as a printer goes and hand cutting the stencil layout. Pros it is faster in a lot of way. Cons the water may become to wet while using it , You have to have multiple copies and matching exact cut line from one copy to another is an art form. While sometimes you can get all the cuts you need on one sheet. depending on color used covers some of the detail.
Plus as you get better and say paint something on a car or bike or what ever that can run into damage the mylar stencil I now create with the silhouette will hold up for decades vs I have some paper stencils I used on some projects in the past that didn't
If you want to see some of the thing I have designed into stencil you can find it here
https://airbrushforum.org/threads/so-what-i-have-been-up-too.24550/
Some are stencil design I bought and some on from photos I made into stencil and some are drawing I have turn into them.
Oh before I forget. Both the Cricut and the Silhouette run 33 max ftlb on the cutting blade. With the great suggestion from
@twood I bought the cb09 blade holders and blades for the silhouette and I am happy I did , The blades hold up longer then the stock blades from either machine.
The Cricut had to holders one for blade and one for a pen. The Silhouete has 2 blade holder one for normal cutting and the 2nd is more for simple designs for cutting things like leather. But it comes with adapters to allow for different tools and pens and they do have a pretty good selection of pens.
Hope this helps