30-Second Verdict
The Venty wins — 9.0 to 8.5 — and not because it's the better machine on its best day. It wins because of what happens on its worst one. Both of these have QC skeletons in the cupboard. The difference is that when a Venty fails, Storz & Bickel replace it inside a week; when a Frolic fails, you join a Serbian waitlist and start refreshing your inbox. Six pounds separates them. Infrastructure separates them completely.
Venty: 9.0/10
Limelight Frolic: 8.5/10
Buy the Frolic if:
- You want true on-demand power — 5-second heat-up, 25 L/min airflow, a 240°C Demand-mode ceiling
- You want a removable 21700 you can swap, spare and replace for years
- You're an early adopter with a backup vape and a taste for the frontier
Buy the Venty if:
- You want near-Frolic airflow with a grown-up warranty operation behind it
- You want the easiest premium session experience going — 20 seconds, pick a temp, pull
- You're a medical user who cannot afford weeks of downtime
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Limelight Frolic | Venty | |
|---|---|---|
| Heat-up | ~5 seconds | 20 seconds |
| Battery | Removable 21700, 6–10 bowls | Internal 2× 18650, 10–14 bowls |
| Bowl | 0.25g chamber (0.15g loads) | 0.25–0.3g |
| Weight | 245g | 254g |
| Warranty | 2 years + 14-day money-back | 2 years (3 with registration) |
| Price | Check current price | Check current price |
The Hook: The Pledge Page and the Returns Desk
You know the Kickstarter feeling. The video is brilliant. The renders are gorgeous. The comments section is a congregation. Some bloke in a workshop has rethought a product category from first principles, and for the price of a mainstream alternative you can own the future — you just have to click "Back this project" and accept that the word "warranty" now means "a man called Goran will reply when he can."
And you know John Lewis. Fluorescent lights. A queue. A returns desk staffed by someone who has seen every possible way a product can fail and is bored by all of them. Nothing about the experience excites you. Everything about it works. You hand over the broken thing; a working thing comes back. There's a reason your nan has bought every appliance she's ever owned from the same department store: not the products — the desk.
The Frolic is the pledge page. The Venty is the returns desk. And the twist that makes this comparison worth 3,000 words is that these two produce eerily similar vapour — I said in the Frolic review that its signature is weirdly close to the Venty's hybrid output — for effectively the same money. You are not choosing between two performances. You're choosing between two answers to the question every premium device eventually asks: what happens when I break?
I called the Venty a Range Rover Sport in its review and the Frolic Nemanja Vidić in his. Both had early wobbles. Only one of them has a dealer network.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Both reviews landed on 9.5/10, and this is the rare pairing where the two 9.5s genuinely overlap: fluffy, dense, hybrid vapour with airflow as the headline. The family resemblance is strong enough that the differences need spelling out.
The Frolic moves more air and goes hotter. 25 L/min against the Venty's 20, a 240°C Demand-mode ceiling against the Venty's 210°C, and no taper when you pull like you mean it. Five seconds from cold. Its first hit is the best first hit I've had from any portable — the Venty included.
The Venty is smarter about the air it moves. Draw-sensing technology adjusts heater output to how hard you're pulling, so every draw lands consistent regardless of technique — no other portable does this, and for repeatability it matters more than headline litres-per-minute. Its cooling is the best S&B have put in a portable, and it delivers all of it as a session device: twenty seconds, set temp, sip for six or seven draws, done.
Winner: a draw on quality, split on philosophy. The Frolic's ceiling is higher — harder hits, hotter temps, instant on-demand. The Venty's floor is higher — every bowl, every draw, the same, with zero technique. Peak versus consistency, and your honest self-assessment of which you'll value on a wet Tuesday in February should carry more weight than either spec sheet.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Same two jars, same grinder — the strain is the control, so the two machines can be read against each other draw for draw. The Frolic ran 0.15g loads; the Venty its usual 0.25g.
Jack Herer
This one goes to the Venty, which surprised me, given the Frolic's convection lean. At 175°C the Venty kept Jack's citrus lift legible across five draws — the best fragile-top-end survival I've had from a session hybrid — because 20 litres a minute of moving air means less hot dwell time between bowl and mouth. There was even a tart haze echo still hanging on at 190°C, draw four, where most ovens have long since blended everything into warm herb. The Frolic opened brighter — real pine and lemon on draw one, five seconds from cold, which the Venty simply cannot do — but by draw three the citrus had thinned to a suggestion, because its whole chamber is hot and the flower cooks whether you're pulling or not. The Frolic's own review conceded the point: on fragile strains you're buying vapour, not resolution.
The Frolic claws back some ground on body — the Venty wide-open is bright but slight, a lot of air per unit of vapour, where the Frolic's clouds are enormous at every stage. And at the top of the range they finish level: earth and leather from both, nothing scorched from either, the Frolic at 203°C and the Venty at 202°C both keeping heat drinkable in ways that shouldn't be possible.
Jack's verdict: Venty on resolution, Frolic on impact — and Jack is a resolution strain.
Wedding Cake
Here's where it gets awkward, because both reviews claimed a version of the same crown: the Frolic's dessert rendering was "richer than anything else in the house", while the Venty half-closed was "the best dessert-strain rendering I've had from a portable". Side by side, same jar, here's the adjudication: the Frolic is richer; the Venty is more composed. The Frolic's low-temp vanilla arrives thicker and its mid-temp butter-and-baked-cake stage carries a density the Venty can't match even with the airflow dial half-closed. But the Venty's version is smoother, cooler and more controllable — the dial turns dilution into an actual instrument, and its four dessert notes stay individually nameable across five easy draws with none of it hot in the mouth.
Both pass the real test — vanilla, butter, dough and pepper as separate items rather than one undifferentiated sweet, and two plants still reading as two plants at the top of the range. If forced: Frolic by a nose on this strain, because Wedding Cake rewards weight and the Frolic has more of it.
The flavour-device call: the Venty is a flavour device with a control surface — dial open for brightness, half-closed for body. The Frolic is a flavour device on robust strains and a delivery device on delicate ones. Across the two strains combined, the Venty is the more complete reader; the Frolic is the more memorable one.
Design & Build
Both scored 9/10, both are PEEK-bodied, and both have survived things they shouldn't have — which is where the stories start diverging.
My Venty survived Kevin, Sarah's fifteen-pound cat, swatting it off the coffee table onto tile. It's survived light rain (IP X4), eight months of daily use, and it stands upright on its base like a device designed by adults. The Frolic's PEEK-and-Ultem body would survive considerably worse — it's the more overbuilt object of the two, Serbian-military-prototype dense — but its cooling unit is the tell: bent screens, a lock wheel that pops off, and the morning mine exploded across the kitchen counter with O-rings bouncing. Sarah's question that day — "You paid how much for something made in Serbia?" — is technically about geography and actually about QC.
Because both have QC histories, and honesty demands both get read out. Early Venty batches (2023–early 2024): button failures, USB ports pushing into the body, E04 errors. Jake's melted on first use. Early Frolics: thermal shutdowns mid-rip, combustion reports at 190–200°C, screens that bend if you look at them sternly. Neither company gets a clean sheet. The difference — and it's the whole article — is the paragraph after the failure. Jake's melted Venty was replaced immediately, with an apology. Dave's combusting Frolic has been on Limelight's RMA waitlist for weeks, support silent for two.
Winner: Venty — not on materials, on what stands behind them.
Battery & Charging
On paper this is the Frolic's category — 9/10 against 8/10 — and in one important sense it earns it: the removable 21700 is simply the better long-term architecture. Spare cells in the bag, external charging, and when the chemistry degrades in a few years it's a cell swap, not an RMA. The sealed Venty is on a timer from day one, and it has no pass-through — a flat Venty is a dead Venty until it charges.
But the Venty wins the number that matters day to day: 10–14 bowls per charge against the Frolic's 6–10, tracked across eight months in my spreadsheet (cheers, ADHD) with only mild degradation. Two 18650s pushing up to 130W will do that. Both devices have a charging asterisk: the Venty effectively requires the Supercharger, sold separately, (80% in 40 minutes; hours without it), while the Frolic's conservative internal charger stops short of 100% unless you buy an external 21700 charger. Yes, both premium devices ask for another purchase to charge properly. No, I'm not less annoyed about it the second time.
Winner: honest split. Frolic for the swappable future, Venty for the bigger tank today. Medical users should note the Frolic's spare-cell option is the real downtime insurance.
Ease of Use
Not close. Venty, 9/10 against 7.5/10. Turn it on, pick a temp, wait twenty seconds, pull — that's the entire Venty curriculum, plus a Superboost double-tap for finishing bowls and a dial that goes from restricted sip to bong rip. Dosing capsules drop in. First-timers produce clouds inside a minute.
The Frolic needs a forum thread and a YouTube tutorial — its words, mine, from the review, and I stand by them. Learn the grind, learn not to tamp, learn the airflow, learn cooling-unit reassembly, and learn to check your ABV because the calibration question never fully leaves the room. The Frolic is a device you study. The Venty is a device you use.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Venty, 7/10 to 6.5/10 — a narrow win in a category neither should brag about. The Venty's improved cooling unit is the best S&B have managed: pull the halves apart, Q-tips and ISO through the channels, a proper teardown every 30–50 bowls. Still S&B maintenance, still twenty minutes, but predictable and nothing bends. The Frolic asks for attention every 10–15 bowls if you're a heavy user, and its screens punish you for providing it — I've bent three in two months, and the lock wheel remains a flight risk. Neither is the TinyMight 2's rinse-and-done glass. Both are liveable. Only one makes you nervous.
Portability
Effectively level — 7.5/10 Frolic, 7/10 Venty — and neither is going in your jeans. The Frolic is a 245g PEEK brick that laughs at bag transport; the Venty is 254g but taller and slimmer, which slides into a jacket pocket more gracefully than its dimensions suggest. The Frolic's on-demand mode gives it the practical edge out in the world — three big rips and you're walking again, versus committing to a Venty session — and its bombproof body needs no case. Winner: Frolic, narrowly, for the on-demand speed; but if you actually need portable, the answer is a different article entirely.
Value for Money
The Frolic scored 8/10, the Venty 7/10 — and yet the Venty wins the purchase decision for most people, which tells you what the value scores can't. The Frolic gives you more performance per pound in a vacuum: more airflow, hotter ceiling, swappable cell, a few quid less. The Venty charges you a premium for things that don't show up on a spec sheet — twenty years of S&B infrastructure, a warranty desk that answers, replacement units that ship in days, and the herbvape.co.uk warranty path that sorted Tom's charging port inside a week.
Think of it as insurance priced into the hardware. The Venty buys you a 9.5/10 vapour engine and a guarantee that failure costs you a week, not a season. The Frolic buys a slightly wilder 9.5/10 engine and a lottery ticket on the aftermath. Winner: Venty — the few-quid gap is the cheapest peace of mind in this catalogue.
Score Comparison
| Category | Limelight Frolic | Venty |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 9.5/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Design & Build | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 6.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Portability | 7.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Value for Money | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Overall | 8.5/10 | 9.0/10 |
Add the categories up and the Frolic actually edges the arithmetic. The overalls go the other way, and they're right to: reliability confidence isn't a category, but it's the thing you're actually buying at this money.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Venty if this will be your main device, your only premium device, or your medical device. The combination of consistency, ease, battery life and a functioning RMA machine makes it the responsible premium buy — and I say that as someone who was publicly sceptical of its launch price and got proven wrong across eight months of daily use. It's also the pick if anyone less obsessive than you will share it: the Venty tolerates casual users; the Frolic eats them.
Buy the Frolic if you're a collector, a tinkerer, or a power chaser with a backup already charged — someone for whom "unproven" is a feature and the 14-day money-back window is a test drive. If you want on-demand hits the session-only Venty structurally cannot deliver, the Frolic isn't just the better choice, it's the only one of the two that qualifies. Buy it with your eyes open and your expectations calibrated: brilliant machine, cottage industry behind it.
Buy both only if you're me, and even then Sarah has opinions.
How I Actually Choose
The Venty is my weekday premium: several sessions a week, wide-open airflow, 185°C, evenings when I want the best S&B session going and no thinking. It out-competes my own Mighty+ for those slots, which still mildly embarrasses me given what I said when it launched. The Frolic is the weekend nuclear option — three or four bowls a week, film nights, the moments I want flattening rather than accompanying. And per the medical notes in both reviews: the backup-device rule isn't paranoia, it's planning. The Venty can't be used while charging; the Frolic can't be fully trusted yet. Between the two of them and the Mighty+ on the counter, something is always ready — which is the unglamorous truth of medical vaping that no pledge page ever mentions.
Last month Sarah found me at the kitchen table photographing a bowl's worth of ABV under the good lamp. "You're photographing burnt weed now," she said. "For a forum." It wasn't burnt — that was the point, I was documenting that it wasn't — but I accept that from the outside, the Frolic has turned me into a man who audits his herb. The Venty has never made me photograph anything. That's the comparison, really.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Every Kickstarter has a moment, about eight months after the campaign, when the updates slow down and the comments turn from congregation to customer-service queue. The product is still brilliant. The people are still sincere. There just aren't enough of them, and the tickets keep coming. Limelight is in that moment now — still shipping, still replacing units, still better than the Grasshopper ghosts whisper. But Dave has been on their waitlist for weeks, and John Lewis would have handed him a new one before the kettle boiled.
That's the whole verdict. The Frolic is the more exciting machine; the Venty is the better purchase — 9.0 to 8.5. The pledge page sells you what the product could be. The returns desk sells you what the company already is. At near-identical prices, the establishment premium is a few quid, and I've never recommended anything more boring with more confidence.
Back the project if you can afford the adventure. Buy from the desk if you need the device.
FAQ
Frolic vs Venty — which should I buy?
The Venty (9.0/10) for most people: near-identical vapour character, far easier to live with, and S&B's warranty machine behind it. The Frolic (8.5/10) if you specifically want on-demand hits, a swappable battery and the hardest-hitting portable available — and you accept first-gen risk with an overwhelmed support desk.
Don't they produce similar vapour?
Strikingly, yes — both fluffy, dense, hybrid-signature clouds, both 9.5/10. The Frolic goes hotter (240°C Demand mode vs 210°C) and moves more air (25 vs 20 L/min); the Venty's draw-sensing keeps every pull consistent. Peak vs consistency.
Which has better battery life?
Per charge, the Venty: 10–14 bowls against 6–10. Long-term, the Frolic: its 21700 is removable, so spares extend runtime indefinitely and a worn cell is a cheap swap rather than a sealed-battery problem. Neither has usable pass-through, and both realistically need an extra charging purchase — the Venty's Supercharger, the Frolic an external 21700 charger.
Both had QC problems — so what's the difference?
The aftermath. Early Venty failures (E04s, buttons, USB ports) were replaced by S&B in about a week — Jake's melted unit and both of Tom's incidents included. Frolic failures currently join a small Serbian workshop's waitlist; Dave's combusting unit has waited weeks. Same risk category, completely different recovery time.
Which is better for medical use?
The Venty, on balance: draw-sensing repeatability, effortless sessions, and minimal downtime risk. The Frolic counters with faster onset (five seconds to first draw) and superb low-temp microdosing in Demand mode — but a medical user needs a backup either way, and needs it more with the Frolic.
Can I use them with a water piece?
The Frolic has a 14mm water adapter and, at its density, arguably belongs on glass. The Venty is designed around its own excellent cooling unit — fine as it comes, not the natural bong candidate of the two.
Is the Frolic another Grasshopper?
Not yet, and possibly never — Limelight still communicates, ships replacements and updates firmware. But the pattern (tiny workshop, cult following, overwhelmed support) rhymes, and pretending otherwise would be selling you shite. Ask me in eighteen months.
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.
Dennis has backed exactly three crowdfunded gadgets in his life. One arrived two years late, one never arrived, and one was brilliant for six months and is now a paperweight with a congregation. He mentions this not as advice, but as the reason there is always a charged Storz & Bickel in the house.
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
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The gamble and the guarantee — both shipped from the UK, both covered by us either way.
Limelight Frolic
Buy the Limelight Frolic →
Worth grabbing with it: Limelight Frolic Cooling Unit — a spare CU turns cleaning day from downtime into a swap.
Venty
Buy the Venty →
Worth grabbing with it: Venty Wear & Tear Set — because even the returns desk prefers you maintain the thing.
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. This comparison draws on six months with the Frolic and eight months of daily Venty use.
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 review 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.