Here's the short version: if you're comparing maxon-motor products, the best all-around buy is usually a maxon brushless dc motor, paired with a gear motor if you need more torque. And if you're asking how fast can a stepper motor turn, the useful answer is much lower than the theoretical one. A typical 1.8° step motor with 36 V drive gives you useful torque at 300–600 rpm, not at its 3,000-rpm no-load speed.
I'm the procurement manager at a 45-person automation company. Since 2019, I've logged every motor order in a cost tracking system: 280 line items—maybe 295 if you count trial orders—and about $340,000 in cumulative spend. I'm not a maxon employee. I'm the person who signs POs and then watches the failure data. This is what I've learned.
Why this article starts with the answer
I do not mean maxon is the right choice for every project. But if your application already points to a precision drive, the decision usually comes down to three questions: Do you need long life? Do you need predictable torque? Can you tolerate a failure? If the answer to any of those is yes, start with a maxon brushless dc motor. It costs more upfront and usually costs less over the machine's life.
That's not a slogan. In 2023, we compared eight suppliers over three months using a TCO spreadsheet. One low-cost PMDC motor came in at $28 per unit; a maxon brushless dc motor was $112 per unit. On a 20-unit order, the sticker gap was $1,680. The low-cost motor's first-year failure rate was around 15%. Three failures cost us $220 each in labor and downtime. Its current draw also forced us to add a $28 external driver per axis. The maxon motors didn't need external filtering or a driver redesign. Net two-year TCO difference: about $460, not $1,680. The surprise wasn't that the expensive motor was better. It was that the cheap option was more expensive after installation.
This is why I trust datasheets only when they're tied to standards. IEC 60034-1 defines how rated torque, speed, and current are tested. Some budget vendors quote no-load performance as if it's the same thing. It isn't. If a supplier won't share a torque curve and the test conditions, I assume the number is the one that looks good in marketing. On maxon's side, the Swiss-made label isn't just a badge; the shipments we've received come with traceable test data and an ISO 9001 audit trail. That doesn't show up as a line item, but it showed up in our board's confidence.
Gear motors are where the budget breathes
If you're trying to lower the cost of a motion axis, start with the motor size, not the motor brand. A gear motor lets you use a smaller motor because the gearhead multiplies torque. We replaced one 60 W brushed motor with a 20 W maxon brushless motor plus a planetary gearhead. The gearhead was expensive as an add-on, but the total axis cost dropped roughly 18% because the motor, encoder, and controller were all smaller. The gearhead efficiency was acceptable for that duty cycle, and the space savings paid off on the mechanical side.
Gear motor selection is full of hidden variables. If you choose a planetary gearhead, you need a backlash number that matches your position loop. If you choose a spur gearhead, you get lower cost but less efficiency and more noise. If you choose a ratio too high, you may end up with a motor running outside its efficient RPM range. The cheapest gear motor on a quote can be the most expensive one once you account for the motor's extra losses.
One product that keeps appearing in my search terms is the maxon air s motor. At first glance it looks like an expensive specialty. In an aerospace actuator project, I priced it, winced, and moved on. Then I redid the comparison using grams per Newton-meter and system weight. The maxon air s motor allowed a lighter frame, a smaller battery, and simpler thermal management. The surprise wasn't the motor price; it was how much supporting structure we could delete around it.
DC servo motors: buy a system, not a motor
When people search for dc servo motors, they usually imagine a motor with an encoder bolted on. That's not the budget reality. In the dc servo world, the motor is maybe 40% of the system cost. The controller, feedback device, cabling, and tuning are the rest. We once quoted a maxon EC motor with a 500-line encoder and a maxon EPOS 4 controller. The motor was 40% of the line item; the controller and software were 45%; cables and connectors were 15%. If you budget based on the motor price alone, you'll underbudget by nearly 2x.
The most frustrating part of sourcing dc servo motors is that 'rated torque' doesn't mean the same thing across vendors. You'd think a written datasheet is a written datasheet. But one vendor's 'rated' is another vendor's 'no-load.' After the third time this bit us, our procurement policy now requires a torque curve, not just a max torque number, for any motor above a certain price. At least, that's been my experience in the 20–80W range that most of our products use.
How fast can a stepper motor turn?
Let's answer the stepper question directly. For a standard 1.8° stepper, there are 200 full steps per revolution. Speed in rpm = (pulses per second × 60) / 200. At 10,000 pps, that's 3,000 rpm. But at that speed, torque is close to zero. In our bench tests, a NEMA 17 stepper with a 36 V driver delivered useful torque up to roughly 400 rpm. Above 600 rpm, available torque dropped fast. It would spin faster, but it couldn't do useful work.
The practical result: if you need speed with torque, a stepper is the wrong tool. A maxon brushless dc motor with a small gearbox, or a dc servo system, will keep the torque curve flatter. That's where the money goes.
When maxon doesn't make sense
I've also learned when maxon is the wrong answer. If you're building a consumer product where a $12 motor is acceptable and a failure just means a warranty unit, the TCO math won't favor maxon. If you need 100,000 commodity motors with loose tolerances, you don't need Swiss manufacturing. And if your only spec is 'make it cheaper,' no precision motor vendor will beat a commodity motor on invoice price.
But don't confuse 'expensive' with 'bad value.' For a small buyer, maxon has been surprisingly easy to deal with. When I first ordered a handful of maxon components, I expected to be ignored because our order was small. I wasn't (which, honestly, I didn't expect). The vendors who took my $300 prototype order seriously are the ones I still use for our $30,000 orders. Small doesn't mean unimportant; it means potential.
Even after I approved the first large maxon order, I kept second-guessing. What if the low-cost supplier had fixed their quality problem by then? The two weeks until delivery were stressful. The motors arrived, measured within spec, and the failure data quieted my doubts. I do not like being lucky. I like being boring and predictable, and that's exactly what this category delivers.
So if your company has a failure-cost line in the P&L, buy the maxon. If it doesn't, you won't feel the difference until it's too late. The price will hurt once. The replacement labor hurts forever.