30-Second Verdict
The Solo 3 v2 wins, 9.2 to 8.7, and it deserves to. It does one thing — clean, legible, glass-path flavour — better than anything portable I own, and the v2 software finally matches the hardware. But the Legacy Pro 2 puts more on your plate for less money: removable battery, dosing caps, a 100–240°C range, and the fastest heat-up of any session vape it competes with. The honest one-liner: if you know what you like, order the single dish; if you want a bit of everything, the buffet is genuinely good — and cheaper.
Solo 3 v2: 9.2/10
Legacy Pro 2: 8.7/10
Buy the Legacy Pro 2 if:
- You want a removable 18650 and refuse to buy another sealed-battery device
- You need one device to cover home sessions AND going-out days
- Dosing caps, 1°C control and a 15-second heat-up appeal to the tinkerer in you
- The money saved funds a spare cell, a charger and a grinder
Buy the Solo 3 v2 if:
- Flavour is the point — the all-glass path is a tier above, full stop
- You want cleaning measured in seconds, not sessions
- 12–15 bowls per charge sounds better than 5–7
- You want the best overall portable under £300, and you're fine with it living mostly at home
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Legacy Pro 2 | Solo 3 v2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heat-up | ~15s | ~20s session / ~15s on-demand |
| Battery | Removable 18650, 5–7 bowls | Sealed, 12–15 bowls |
| Bowl | 0.2–0.3g | 0.1–0.15g stem / 0.2–0.25g XL pod |
| Weight | ~232g | 280g |
| Warranty | Lifetime (register within 30 days) | Lifetime heater, 2yr device, 1yr battery |
| Price | Check current price | Check current price |
The Hook
There's a hotel buffet Sarah and I ended up at in the Lakes a few years back — one of those spreads that goes carvery, curry, pasta station, cheese board, a suspicious paella. I did what everyone does. Three trips, a plate like a council tip, a bit of everything, and by the end I couldn't have told you what any single thing tasted like. Sarah ordered the one fish dish off the menu, ate it slowly, and looked insufferably pleased about it.
Both of us left full. Only one of us could describe dinner.
The Legacy Pro 2 is the buffet. The Solo 3 v2 is the single perfect dish.
I called the AirVape the Sage Barista Express when I reviewed it — the most ambitious portable on the market, everything on the spec sheet, session and on-demand and removable cell and dosing caps and a temperature range wide enough to warm milk at one end and worry your herb at the other. And I called the Solo 3 v2 Joy Division becoming New Order: one idea — hot air through borosilicate glass — refined across a decade until the software finally caught up with the heater.
One device is trying to be everything you might want. The other has decided what it is and become excellent at it. That's not a quality gap so much as a philosophy gap — though in this case the philosophy gap produces a quality gap too, and it's half a point wide.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
9/10 plays 9.5/10, and the half point is the glass.
The Solo 3 v2's all-glass vapour path isn't marketing waffle — it's the difference between vinyl and streaming, the note you didn't know was in the song. Roughly 80% convection through a borosilicate stem, session mode buttery and predictable, on-demand hitting a stable temperature in about fifteen seconds. Nothing at this price combines flavour purity, dual-mode versatility and consistency like it. That was the review's claim and eight months of daily use haven't dented it.
The Legacy Pro 2's vapour is properly strong — denser than the Crafty+, in the Mighty+'s conversation at the top of the bowl — and its opening draws at 195°C arrive without the warm-up puff most session vapes waste on you. But it's draw-dependent: pack tight or pull hard and the output collapses. And the flavour, while clean, honest and a clear step up from the V1, is slightly dry — not as layered as a glass-path Arizer, by its own review's admission.
The wrinkle worth knowing: both devices do session and on-demand, which makes them rarer company for each other than either finds elsewhere. The Solo 3's on-demand is the more controlled and precise; the AirVape's hold-to-heat is quicker to access but damped. On-demand honours go to Arizer.
Winner: Solo 3 v2. The AirVape competes on strength. The Arizer wins on resolution.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Same jars, same grinder, stems and airpaths cleaned between strains. The Legacy Pro 2 ran 180/192/203°C; the Solo 3 v2 ran 175/185/200°C. Don't read anything into the different ladders — each device gets tested where it lives.
Jack Herer
The Solo 3 v2's Jack is the reference. At the bottom of its ladder, pine needles arrived with nothing in front of them — no warm-up note, nothing added by the path — plus a cooling menthol edge that only a cold glass stem produces. Across fourteen draws the review watched the handover happen in slow motion: citrus thinning rather than vanishing, pepper arriving as a separate event, still distinguishable from heat at the top. Its verdict: the best Jack Herer from anything on this site that doesn't plug into a wall — not the loudest, the most legible.
The Legacy Pro 2's Jack is a conditional success. Packed deliberately loose in a dosing cap, it held pine to draw four and separated pepper properly from heat at the mid stage — a genuinely good hybrid result. But it needed a mid-bowl re-tamp to keep the density up, the pre-heated chamber rounds the pine warmer and softer than convection-through-glass, and the whole eleven-draw performance came with the review's confession that at least half the result belonged to the operator. On the Arizer, the pine is the machine's doing. On the AirVape, it's partly yours.
Put directly: where the Solo 3's citrus lift thins gracefully over three draws mid-ladder, the AirVape's has to be managed into surviving. On a fragile, terpinolene-led strain, glass and patience beat features. It's not especially close.
Wedding Cake
Closer, and more interesting.
The Solo 3 v2 rendered the dessert profile as four nameable things — vanilla, butter, dough, pepper — with the cherry edge deepening towards jam at the mid stage, and an evenly golden-brown ABV showing off the hybrid heater. But its own review flagged the trade: glass doesn't upholster. The rendering is well-lit and faintly clinical, and someone stepping over from a plusher device could find it thin.
The Legacy Pro 2, meanwhile, relaxes on this strain. The airflow sensitivity that dogged Jack barely showed up — the denser bud fills the cap without choking it — and it produced eleven draws of butter, warm dough and well-behaved pepper with no re-tamp and no thinking. Thicker-bodied than the Arizer's version, slightly drier at the finish, tipping towards burnt sugar a shade earlier at the top of its ladder.
One fresh observation the two reviews support: on Wedding Cake, the gap between these devices nearly closes, because the strain does the separating work the glass path usually has to do. If your jar leans dessert genetics, the AirVape gets you surprisingly close to the Arizer for less. If it leans old-school sativa, it doesn't.
The call: both are flavour devices by the site's test — both kept two plants tasting like two plants at the top of their ladders. But the Solo 3 v2 is a flavour device first, and the Legacy Pro 2 is a delivery device that can do genuine flavour when you set it up for it. That's the buffet and the dish on a plate.
Design & Build
The AirVape is the prettier object: cork wrap, gold-plated chamber, glass airpath, ceramic mouthpiece, ~232g of warm-to-the-touch ambition. The Arizer is chunky cylindrical function — anodised aluminium, 280g, my Sea of Green unit through eight months of daily use and multiple tumbles without a rattle. Tom's Solo 3 v1 went back with Error 5 inside three months, classic Tom luck with electronics — but his v2 replacement has been rock solid, which is the version you'd be buying.
Fragility runs opposite ways: the Solo 3's body is drop-proof but its glass stems aren't — two cracked in eight months, budget for spares. The Legacy Pro 2 has no glass stems to break, but a small percentage of early units shipped with cork-veneer bubbling (lifetime warranty sorts it, no quibble).
Winner: a split. Materials and looks, AirVape (8.5). Proven, boring, tumble-tested solidity, Arizer (9) — as long as you respect the glass.
Battery & Charging
On paper this is a rout. 12–15 bowls per charge for the Solo 3 v2 against the AirVape's 5–7 — the Arizer is still showing half battery when the AirVape is asking for its charger. And while Arizer quote three hours to full, a proper USB-C PD brick refills it in about ninety minutes. Both do pass-through.
The AirVape's counterargument is the one it always makes: the 18650 comes out. A spare cell in your pocket beats any sealed capacity figure on a long day, and it means the device outlives its battery — then outlives the next one. The Solo 3's pack is sealed; when it eventually degrades, the whole unit goes back to Arizer.
So: daily convenience, Solo 3 v2, and it's not close (9 vs 8.5). Five-year economics, Legacy Pro 2. Pick your timescale.
Ease of Use
Both have a learning curve; they've hidden them in different places.
The Solo 3 v2's curve is in the on-demand mode — overpack the stem and the first press browns the top layer. Loose pack, 2–3mm headroom, one week of trial and error, sorted. Everything else is now genuinely pleasant: the v2 software let you disable the maddening lock screen, presets are customisable, and loading is just funnelling ground herb into a glass tube.
The Legacy Pro 2's curve is in everything operational: the airflow-sensitive draw, the damped on-demand response, and above all the clamshell — the worst loading mechanism on a premium portable, a small negotiation with gravity every time you open it, AVB stuck to the underside of the lid as a parting gift. The dosing caps are the fix, and they're mandatory in all but name.
Winner: Solo 3 v2 (8.5 vs 8). Funnel beats hinge.
Cleaning & Maintenance
The Solo 3 v2 is the easiest-cleaning serious portable I've ever tested: the glass stems are the only parts that gunk, the oven stays essentially new because the herb never sits in it, and maintenance is thirty seconds plus an occasional ISO soak. The honey reclaim is even usable. 9.5/10 and earned.
The Legacy Pro 2, capsule-led, is honestly fine — about a minute a day, five minutes weekly. But it's fine because of the caps; run bare and you're Q-tipping gaskets and soaking airpaths for a quarter of an hour a week.
Winner: Solo 3 v2. Though it's worth saying the AirVape's 8.5 here would win most other pairings on this site — it's lost to the category king, not to a good score.
Portability
Neither disappears into skinny jeans, but they fail differently. The Solo 3 v2 is an "around the house" portable by its own review's admission — 280g, glass stems needing a pencil case, jacket pocket with intent. The Legacy Pro 2 is a genuine going-out device: deck-of-cards footprint, no glass to shatter, and the five-caps-in-a-tin workflow that means you never load in public.
Winner: Legacy Pro 2 (8 vs 7) — the one category where the cheaper device wins outright, and for some buyers the only category that matters.
Value for Money
The AirVape is the cheaper of the two, and both reviews rate their device well here — 9 for the Arizer, 8 for the AirVape.
The Solo 3 v2's case: it's two vapes in one body at the best value-per-quality ratio in the £200–300 bracket, with cleaning and battery life that save you money and time forever. The Legacy Pro 2's case: it's the widest feature spread in its bracket, cheaper, with a lifetime warranty and a battery you can replace yourself instead of an RMA.
If the question is "which is the better device per pound," the Arizer still edges it — a 9.2 at the Solo's price is the strongest arithmetic on the site. If the question is "what's the best thing at the AirVape's money," it isn't competing with the Solo 3 at all; it's competing with everything else at its price, and it beats all of it.
Winner: Solo 3 v2, narrowly, on the strength of what the extra money buys.
Score Comparison
| Category | Legacy Pro 2 | Solo 3 v2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 9/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Design & Build | 8.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 8.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 8/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 8.5/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Portability | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Value for Money | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Overall | 8.7/10 | 9.2/10 |
Six categories to the Arizer, one to the AirVape. But look at the margins: mostly half-points. The Legacy Pro 2 is in the conversation everywhere. The Solo 3 v2 just keeps winning the conversations.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Solo 3 v2 if flavour is why you vape. If you've ever tasted the difference between draw one and draw four and cared, if the phrase "terp clarity" doesn't make you roll your eyes, if your device mostly lives on a desk or a coffee table — the Arizer is the best portable this site has scored, and the premium over the AirVape is the cheapest half-point upgrade in the hobby. Solo 2 owners get the bonus of a shared glass ecosystem; every stem carries over, including the 3D Flow stem Dave tried once and now won't shut up about.
Buy the Legacy Pro 2 if your life doesn't happen at a desk. If you need one device that covers the sofa on Tuesday and a festival on Saturday, if a sealed battery feels like a countdown timer, if you actively enjoy dialling things in — the AirVape gives you the widest spread of capabilities in its bracket and asks less for it. You'll trade away resolution on delicate strains and inherit a clamshell hinge. You'll gain caps, a swappable cell, and a device that goes where the Arizer won't.
And if you're tempted to buy both: I did, effectively, and Sarah watched me carry the pair to the desk one evening and delivered her assessment of the whole comparison genre. "You do this at the carvery as well," she said. "Pile it all on, then just eat the roast potatoes." The Solo 3 v2 is the roast potatoes.
How I Actually Choose
The Solo 3 v2 is my daily driver — roughly 35% of everything I vape goes through it, session mode at 185°C most evenings, on-demand micro-hits between work tasks during the day. It broke my kettle ritual, famously: the vape is now ready before I've found a mug, a problem I've learned to live with. It does not leave the house, and I've stopped pretending it will.
The Legacy Pro 2 runs three or four sessions a week and owns the going-out slot on big days — it's the device that did six hours at Parklife on five pre-loaded caps and a spare cell in reserve, which is a job description the Solo 3 couldn't apply for. Home flavour: Arizer. Anywhere else, or any day I want to fiddle: AirVape. The rotation sorted itself out inside a fortnight and hasn't changed since.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Back at that hotel buffet, the thing I remember isn't any single dish — it's the plate. Lots of it, decent value, everything present, nothing distinct. Sarah's fish, I could describe to you now.
The Solo 3 v2 wins this comparison because one perfect dish beats a good buffet whenever quality is the question. 9.2 against 8.7, flavour a clear tier ahead, cleaning and battery life that make daily ownership frictionless. If your budget stretches to the Solo and your vaping happens mostly at home, buy it and don't look back.
But don't let the scoreline flatten the AirVape. The Legacy Pro 2 is the best all-you-can-eat in its bracket — the only device here with a removable battery, the only one you'd take to a festival, and cheaper while doing it. The buffet exists because sometimes you genuinely do need a bit of everything.
Know which eater you are. Order accordingly.
FAQ
Legacy Pro 2 vs Solo 3 v2 — which should I buy?
The Solo 3 v2 if flavour and easy ownership top your list — it's the better device, 9.2 vs 8.7. The Legacy Pro 2 if you need a removable battery, true out-of-the-house portability, or want to spend less. Feature stacker vs flavour king is the honest summary.
Both do session and on-demand — is there really a difference?
Yes. The Solo 3 v2's on-demand is more controlled and precise, with customisable presets. The Legacy Pro 2's hold-to-heat is faster to access but noticeably damped. For regular on-demand use, the Arizer; for occasional top-ups, either.
Which is easier to clean?
The Solo 3 v2 — thirty seconds, glass stems are the only gunky parts, the oven stays pristine. The Legacy Pro 2 is easy with dosing caps (five minutes a week) and fiddly without them. Arizer wins, but both beat almost everything else at this level.
Which battery setup is better for a medical user who depends on the device daily?
Short-term, the Solo 3 v2 — 12–15 bowls and 90-minute PD charging means it's essentially never flat. Long-term, the Legacy Pro 2 — the removable 18650 means the device never becomes a paperweight when the cell degrades. If dependence is truly daily and multi-year, the removable cell is the safer bet.
Can I use either with a bong or water piece?
Neither is designed for it. Arizer's glass ecosystem has water-adapter stems available third-party, which gives the Solo 3 the edge if you're determined. For proper water-piece use, look at the VonG X — that's its entire reason for existing.
Do the glass stems really break?
Two in eight months here — one on tiles, one at a mate's house. Spares come in two-packs. If you have dexterity issues, factor it in; the Legacy Pro 2 has no equivalent vulnerability.
Is the Legacy Pro 2's lifetime warranty better than Arizer's?
On paper, yes — lifetime on the whole device versus lifetime on the heater only (2 years device, 1 year battery, glass never covered). But it's conditional on registering within 30 days of purchase. Do it the day the box arrives.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M. has been vaping daily for the best part of a decade — since an original Mighty in 2018 — and has tested 50+ devices for this site. He works in IT, has ADHD, and uses cannabis for chronic pain management. He lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah, who has noticed the Arizer shelf is getting crowded and once proposed a 'one in, one out' policy that remains, to this day, unimplemented.
Dennis has never once left a buffet without regret or a good restaurant without wanting to go back. He is aware this explains his entire vaporiser collection, and he'd thank you not to mention it.
A note on spelling: 'vaporizer' is the de facto international spelling, but I've stuck with the British 'vaporiser' throughout this blog.
Questions, corrections, or a device you want tested? dennis@herbvape.co.uk
Related Content
Full Reviews:
- AirVape Legacy Pro 2 Review: The Sage Barista Express
- Arizer Solo 3 v2 Review: Joy Division Became New Order
Head-to-Head Comparisons:
- Legacy Pro 2 vs Mighty+: Which Hybrid Wins?
- Legacy Pro 2 vs PAX Flow: Two Premium Hybrids Compared
- Solo 3 vs Mighty+
Best-Of Guides:
New to Vaping?
Get Both at HerbVape.co.uk
Arizer Solo 3 v2 — the single perfect dish: the best flavour and the easiest ownership of any portable we stock.
Buy the Solo 3 v2 →
Worth grabbing with it: Air / Solo - Glass Mouthpiece 90mm — spare stems aren't optional; tiles exist.
AirVape Legacy Pro 2 — the buffet: session, on-demand, removable cell and dosing caps in one going-anywhere body.
Buy the AirVape Legacy Pro 2 →
Worth grabbing with it: HerbVape Smell-Proof Case (Small) — takes the device and a tin of pre-loaded caps.
Just one more bowl.
Last updated: 25 September 2026.
Review Policy: I buy or borrow the devices I review. HerbVape.co.uk is my employer, but my opinions are my own — they pay me to be honest, not to sell you shite. Affiliate links and discount codes exist because running a site costs money, not because they influence scores.
Strains Used: Jack Herer — sativa (Haze × Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk), ~20% THC, terpinolene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant, pine-citrus-pepper profile with fragile top notes. Wedding Cake — indica-leaning hybrid (Triangle Kush × Animal Mints, via Triangle Mints #23), ~24% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene-dominant, vanilla-cream-dough dessert profile over peppery earth. Same two strains, same jars, across every vaporiser reviewed on this site — the strain is the control, the device is the variable. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing in this article constitutes medical advice, and I am not a medical professional. Cannabis is a controlled substance in the UK; medical cannabis is legal only on prescription from a registered specialist clinic — Sapphire, Cantourage and Zerenia are three of the larger ones. HerbVape.co.uk sells vaporiser hardware only: we do not sell, prescribe, or recommend cannabis or cannabis products. Vaporisers are sold for use with legal dry herbs and legally prescribed medical cannabis. You must be 18 or over to buy one, and cannabis law varies by jurisdiction — check yours.