I hate these kind of answers, but it really depends on what kind of things you do with C4D. If you use all of the modules to a certain level you may find Carrara a lacking. Modeling in in C4D is much much more robust, however Hexagon which works in conjunction with Cararra (around $140) can make up some of the difference. I bought Silo (similar price) which I prefer, not as many features (in it's current release, new release impending) as Hex, but for modeling single objects (especially organic) it is really easy and fun, I prefer it. The spline modeling is far superior in C4D and allows for "growth" along a spline animation that is not there in Carrara and C4D also allows a lot more tweaking controls of all parameters. Hyper NURBS is a great thing. You can't even begin to compare the particle systems. There is no soft body dynamics in Carrara Pro. Feature for feature as far as what you can achieve creatively, C4D is greatly superior because you have much, much more variables you can control. However, if you are not utilizing that level of control than you might be very, very happy with Carrara. Carrara is much easier to learn out of the box (but then again I learned it first). The two aps approach most things very differently, so if you are already use to C4D you will have a little bit of mental adjusting to do, but Carrara is still very easy. The interfaces are vastly different. Carrara has some wonderful things like the built in terrain editor, which is exceptionally cool. You have much more access to Poser through Carrara. New features like the replicator is really cool. Once you get use to the difference, I think you will be very impressed with Carrara's Materials editor. It actually uses shader trees which you don't get In C4D. Carrara's material editor allows you to blend, and layer to your hearts content it's actually quite sophisticated and comes with a lot of great built in shaders. Digital Carver's Guild offers add-ons for Carrara that are very impressive and down right cheap compared to the non-shareware plug-ins for C4D. In some ways, Carrara's material editor is actually superior in how you actually create materials, all though the control of how materials are applied to objects or groups of objects is much better in C4D. C4D's use of tags is fantastic (if you use them) no such feature exists for Carrara. However, Carrara has some built-in drag-and-drop animation behaviors that are really quite good for quickly setting up some fast but impressive canned animation. There is no such thing as expression based animation in Carrara, although there is a plug-in called "Cognito" that can do some of that type thing with much less control. I suggest you visit the "Carrara Add-Ons" page on the Eovia site and look at all that is there to see if you can add back some of the things you loose from C4D to Carrara. In some ways I actually like the renderer in Carrara better (tile based verses scan line) Carrara's net rendering is way easier to set up. The quality of special effects rendering in C4D is much better (if you need them). If you are really hard pressed for cash you can buy a new sealed version of Carrara 3 on eBay for $40 (yes Four, 0) and then upgrade to Carrara 5 Pro for $299 (assuming you don't already have a Carrara product to upgrade from) Although $340 is still a decent hunk of change, it's nothing compared to even a single C4D module. If I were you I'd go that route. If you really don't like Carrara, than by comparison, you're not out that much compared to upgrading C4D plus modules. You might want to contact Eovia to see if they plan to release a trial version any time soon. The list of differences is quite huge, some subtle, some massive. It just depends on which ones apply to your work. What kind of work do you do with C4D?