Are Brother laser printers really better than HP?

In the signals we read, specialist communities (notably r/printers and r/sysadmin threads) overwhelmingly recommend Brother over HP, citing HP's account-required setup, firmware updates that block third-party toner, and software issues. High-trust expert testing (consumerreports.org) rates both brands' print quality as excellent, so the gap is mostly about cost-of-ownership and software friction rather than output quality.