Brothread vs Simthread Embroidery Thread: Which One Earns Its Spot?

Marjorie from church uses Simthread. I use New brothread. That is the comparison in one line, and it is also why I am not going to turn this into a shouting match. She brought her set to fellowship hall one Sunday after service, we stood there passing spools back and forth under the fluorescent lights, and I came home and looked at my own rolling cart with fresh eyes. What follows is what I actually know after three years of stitching monograms and names on hand towels, bath towels, fleece baby blankets, canvas totes and cloth napkins, on a Brother SE1900 that sits on a folding table in the spare bedroom upstairs.

Short answer first. If you are starting from nothing, the New brothread 40 color polyester kit is the one I would buy again. Forty spools of 40 weight thread, 500 meters on each spool, with a printed chart, is enough range for the work I do, and the listing's colorfast claim matters when a monogrammed bath towel is going to be washed hot for years. If you already have a working palette and you need one spool to finish a name, Simthread's open stock makes more sense. Everything after this is the reasoning, including the two rows where I think Simthread genuinely wins.

	New brothread 40 color kit	Simthread
Format	One kit, forty spools, 40 weight polyester, 500 meters each	Open stock spools sold singly
Choosing the palette	Set by the kit, forty colors at once	You pick each color as the project needs it
Matching a shade someone requested	You work from the forty in the kit, which covers most requests but not all	You can chase the exact shade from open stock
Printed chart	Chart in the box, spools sorted to it on the cart	I did not see a chart I could pin up, only what was printed on the case
Volume before you start	Forty spools ready on day one	Only the colors you have bought
Weight and fiber	40 weight polyester	40 weight polyester
What you can check before buying	Weight, length, fiber, care and colorfastness all on the listing	You read the spool label in the shop
Best for	A home machine that needs a working range for gifts	Filling gaps in a palette you built years ago

Where New brothread Wins

The kit is a system, and that is the part I underrated when I bought it in November 2023. Before it, I had a handful of Brother-branded spools that came with the machine and a vague worry about running out mid-project. The kit put forty spools on the cart in one go, sorted by the chart, and I have not once had to stop a towel because I was missing a color I needed. For gifts on a deadline, with a name to stitch before a baby shower on Saturday, that matters more than any single spool's personality.

The other win is that the listing tells you what you are getting. Forty weight, 500 meters, polyester, care instructions, and a colorfast statement about commercial laundering and bleaching. When I started in the fall of 2023 I did not know what 40 weight meant. Having it spelled out on the product page, along with the length of each spool, saved me from buying something too fine or too heavy for a 5 by 7 field. That is not exciting. It is just useful.

The chart deserves its own paragraph because it is the part I use every week and the part nobody mentions in reviews. Mine lives in the storage box with the spools, and when a spool comes out, the chart tells me which slot it goes back into. That sounds fussy. It is the difference between grabbing navy in five seconds and digging through a box of forty for two minutes while a towel waits under the needle. Marjorie's set did not come with anything I could pin to the wall, at least not that I saw, and I would miss mine more than I expected.

The 500 meter spools are longer than they look in the product photo. Three years in, most of the forty are still the original spools, and the ones I have replaced are the workhorses: navy and white. That tells you something about how much thread a monogram actually uses, which is not much, and something about the kit's real job. It is not a lifetime supply. It is a buffer against a project starting on a Sunday evening when nothing is open. My gold spool is the one I check most often, because gold goes on the auction towels in November and on small names in the spring, and it has not thinned out enough to notice yet. When a spool does give out, it gives out mid-name without warning, which is the other reason I like having the whole box within arm's reach of the table.

Where Simthread Wins

Open stock is the honest advantage. A kit is a fixed palette chosen by somebody else, and eventually you run low on navy and white while the two spools you never touch sit there looking at you. With Simthread you buy the color the project needs, one spool at a time, which is the right shape of purchase for a single name on a single towel or for matching a specific shade somebody picked out. Marjorie's set is built that way, and she refills it the same way.

The second concession is palette depth over years. A forty spool kit is a starting point, not a lifetime supply. Once you know that you stitch mostly navy, white, a soft pink, a light blue for baby items and gold, the fixed range starts to feel like thirty spools of insurance and ten of daily work. Open stock lets the palette grow toward what you actually use. I also have to say that Marjorie's spools fed cleanly on her machine the afternoon she showed me, no puddling and no fuss, though one afternoon and one set is not a test of anything.

What Three Years on a 5 by 7 Field Taught Me

The Brother SE1900 has a 5 by 7 inch embroidery field, which limits the size of what I can stitch and quietly teaches you which thread problems are worth caring about. Tension, weight consistency and whether a spool feeds evenly matter far more than brand loyalty. The New brothread spools have run through this machine without me adjusting tension for them, which is the entire review in one sentence. They behave like 40 weight polyester is supposed to behave on a home machine.

Colorfastness is the claim I have actually tested, though not in a lab. Towels with monograms have gone through hot washes and a bleach load or two over three years, and the names have held. The white has not gone gray and the navy has not bled into the towel. I cannot tell you what the thread will do in a commercial laundry, only that the listing says it holds up there and my kitchen washer has not proved it wrong.

Fleece and toweling ask different things of thread, and the kit handled both. A fleece baby blanket with a name across the corner needs a thread that does not shred when the needle heats up from a denser stitch count. A bath towel needs a thread that will sit on top of terry cloth without disappearing into the pile. The same 40 weight spool did both jobs, with a water soluble topper on the towel and a single sheet of tear away under the fleece. The thread was never the variable that caused a problem. The first fleece blanket I stitched, in the winter of 2023, puckered around the name, and I spent a whole evening blaming the thread before I noticed the hoop had gone loose on the second side. Same spool, same setting, a tighter hoop, and the next one came out clean. That is the pattern with every problem I have had on this machine: the thread is the last thing to suspect and the first thing I blamed.

Where the kit shows its limits is anything outside the range. If a customer wants a shade that is not in the forty, I am ordering a single spool anyway, from whoever has it. That is not a flaw in the kit. It is just the difference between a starting palette and a full thread library, and nobody should buy forty spools expecting the second thing.

The Spool Behavior Nobody Warns You About

A few spools in my kit let the thread slip off the top and puddle while the machine is running. Not many, maybe three or four out of forty over three years, and only when the spool is getting low. The fix is a thread net, the little mesh sleeve that sits over the spool and keeps the thread where it belongs. I keep a small bag of them in the drawer with the curved scissors. If you buy the kit and see a loose loop forming above the spool, that is what is happening.

I mention it because it is the sort of thing that makes a beginner think the machine is broken or the thread is bad. It is neither. Simthread spools can do the same thing, for all I know, since thread coming off a spool too fast is physics and not a brand. Marjorie has not mentioned it, but Marjorie also does not complain about much. Put a net on it and keep stitching.

Needle choice matters more than I knew in 2023. A fresh embroidery needle and a spool that feeds evenly will solve most of what looks like a thread problem. I keep a small card of needles in the table drawer now and swap one in at the start of anything with a name on it, which works out to roughly one per project. The skipped stitches I used to chase by loosening the bobbin case mostly stopped once I started doing that, and the thread stopped getting blamed for a worn point. If you take one thing from this section, take that.

Three years, one machine, forty spools, and the only real failure has been a spool that puddled until I put a net over it.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the New brothread kit if you are new to machine embroidery, if your work is gifts and small orders of monogrammed towels and blankets, and if you want a working range on the cart before the next project starts. It pairs naturally with a 5 by 7 field and a home machine. It is also the right buy if you would rather sort spools once than place a thread order every other week.

Buy Simthread if you already have a palette and you are filling gaps, or if a project needs one specific shade you can go get. It is the better shape of purchase for somebody who has been stitching for years and knows exactly which five colors do most of the work. That is not a knock on either brand. It is a question of whether you are building a range or maintaining one.

If a friend asked me at the craft fair table which one to buy, I would ask her one question: do you have a palette yet? If the answer is no, the kit. If the answer is yes, and she is down to the last of the navy, then a single spool of Simthread or anything else that matches. The brand matters less than whether you are stocking a range or patching one. I would also tell her to buy the nets before she needs them. Nine times out of ten the answer is the kit, because most people who ask me are standing at a table in their first year, and the ones who are not are already deep enough in to know what they want. The question sorts itself out once you say it out loud.

Neither choice will make or break a project. The machine, the stabilizer and the hoop matter at least as much, and a good hoop with the right stabilizer will forgive a mediocre spool faster than good thread will forgive a hoop that is too loose. Buy the thread that matches how you actually sew, keep it netted when it puddles, and spend your worrying on the towel.