My suggestion is that you visit several sewing machine shops if that is possible and have the staff at each shop show you how their machines operate and what the machine can offer you. The expense of either machine setup certainly warrants some research. Some machines can do regular sewing, quilting, and embroidery and some machines can do only quilting and sewing and others only embroidery. So much depends on the type and maker of machine. Also, the quilting skills and embroidery skills - while they both relate to fabric and thread - are very different. And if you haven't done much machine embroidery, you won't know if you like it until you can see the process. If it isn't possible to visit individual sewing machine shops, I suggest you do a little on-line research and maybe watch some YouTube tutorials. That might help .