bigboi
Would love to hear your opinions. I can get the total bundle, every plug fabfilter makes, for $900. Just wanted to see if you guys preferred comparable waves plugs, or the fabfilter stuff. Sound off guys
It's a tough question to answer without knowing the Waves plugins/bundles that you are considering, but these are two of my favorite plugin developers, so I'll give you my perspective. I have all of the FabFilter plugins except Micro and FabFilter One. I think I've purchased every one of them as soon as they were released because they give great loyalty discounts and because they make some of the best plugins on the market IMO. I also have several Waves plugins/bundles (Gold, Renaissance Maxx, SSL 4000, Maserati, and H-EQ).
Two things that really set FabFilter apart from Waves and the rest of the pack is their (1) really intuitive and nice-looking interfaces, and (2) implementation of m/s processing. I highly recommend that you watch some of the product videos and tutorials on their website to really get a good feel for how deep these plugins are. My go-to EQ, compressor, gate, and limiter are Pro-Q, Pro-C, Pro-G, and Pro-L, but the Waves L1 and C1 are excellent as well and get a lot of use. Between Pro-Q and Waves Q10, there is no contest IMO - Pro-Q is a far superior EQ, but Waves H-EQ is a nice alternative to Pro-Q and has more filter types and better "color" options.
FabFilter Saturn (multiband saturation/distortion) is unmatched by any Waves products IMO. Same goes for FabFilter Volcano (modular filter effect) and Simplon (basic filter plugin). Timeless (delay) is a very flexible delay with a ton of modulation capabilites - it's a bit overkill for basic delay needs, though, and is better as a sound design effect, rather than a bread-n-butter delay IMO. Waves SuperTap or H-Delay are better in that respect IMO. FabFilter Twin2 is a great synth and, obviously, Waves does not offer any synths.
On the flip side, Waves has a ton of products that FabFilter doesn't offer (yet). I won't go through all of them, but a few things that jump out at me are the some of their specialty effects, like MondoMod, Doppler, Enigma, and MetaFlanger, and some of their color/vintage-style compressors and EQs (e.g., V-series and H-series). The RenBass and MaxxBass plugins are really excellent and unmatched plugins. Actually, the entire Renaissance bundle is an excellent buy. If you're a channel strip whore like me, you'll probably love RenChannel (one of my favorite plugins ever) and the SSL channel strips. FabFilter doesn't offer any channel strips, although they have mentioned in the past that it may be offered in the future. Waves also offers several de-essers, doublers, auto-tuning software (i.e., Waves Tune - very underrated IMO), guitar amp modeling, etc., not to mention several reverbs, which FabFilter does not offer.
So, really, it's hard to make a comparison without knowing which Waves bundles you're considering, but for the most part, I generally prefer the FabFilter plugins where they overlap with an equivalent Waves product, but I personally couldn't get by with FabFilter alone and I don't think I have any projects whose FX bins aren't stacked with FF and Waves plugins. Not sure how helpful that is, since you aren't considering buying both, but I guess if you can narrow down where your plugin needs lie, it might help you choose between the two brands.