The Ender 3 really set the bar for a capable inexpensive printer. I don’t know much about the Neo to comment, but it looks very close to the original Ender 3.
I don’t know much about the Anycubic, but some of the Ender clones you have to be careful with. There are plenty on the market and some have had no, malfunctioning, or subpar thermal runaway protection.
I’m bias since I started with it, but the Ender 3 V2 is a great printer to start with. There is a ton of aftermarket goodies to build what you want and it’s capable enough to get solid prints on. I usually recommend to ditch the factory bed springs for the yellow stiffened ones. They’re super cheap. Once you get comfortable with tramming the bed, you can upgrade to an auto bed leveling system and solid mounts.
I think it’s important to have a basic printer to learn on. Sure you could spend the money on a Prusa and be done, they’re pretty much set it and forget it, but when it shits the bed and you don’t know why you’re scrambling for answers. You can learn the basics on a Creality machine and really learn the in’s and outs to tweak your prints. I made a lot of crap prints before I made good ones.
The upgrades for the Creality machines are cheap too. And as you feel you have outgrown what it can do you can relegate to simpler tasks or proto prints and get a workhorse to do larger, longer prints with. Lots of options, I recommend doing a fair bit of research if you’re going to stray from the major players.
