Hey On-That Fans,
Two words get used almost interchangeably by people just getting into designer toys, and they really shouldn't be — sofubi and resin are different materials, made differently, and collected a little differently too.
Sofubi is short for "soft vinyl" — a Japanese toy tradition going back decades, made by injecting vinyl into a metal mold. It's got a bit of give to it, a distinct texture, and is the material behind most classic kaiju and monster-style toys. Because it needs a metal mold, sofubi runs tend to happen in batches through an established factory relationship, even when the batch is small.
Resin is cast, not injection-molded — poured by hand into a silicone mold, one (or a handful) at a time. That's what makes most Western bootleg and designer toy culture possible: no factory minimum, no tooling cost, just an artist and a mold. It's harder, doesn't flex, and every piece has tiny hand-cast variation.
Neither one is "better" — they're just different traditions that ended up circling the same collector base. Most of what's in the bootleg/designer scene here is resin (small-batch, artist-direct); sofubi pieces tend to be the ones with that classic Japanese kaiju lineage behind them.