Same for me, got the Helix in 2015. Loved it, it was my main rig for 7 years. Got the FM3 a month ago to see what all the commotion was about Fractal products. After 30 minutes, my ears picked the FM3. The very next day, Helix went back in the box and off to the used music equipment store. They gave me $800, Yay. I had a lot of fun with the Helix, got more than my money's worth out of it. To my ears, the Fractal blew the Helix out of the water. Every factory preset with it's scenes are frikken' incredible. We're gonna have lots of fun with my new little friend. Congrats!
Have to agree about fractal having superior tones. They give you that last 10-15% difference that seemed to usually be out of reach for me on the Helix. That may not sound like a lot of difference, but it totally is. I was accustomed to "fighting" my Helix. Sure, I could dial in good clean tones all day long, but anything beyond that was a struggle. I did it all, high and low cuts, EQ sometimes, custom patches and IRs (which usually didn't give me the results in the YT videos, though some were very good), and yeah, it just seems TO ME that the Helix way of getting a great tone is elusive and often times complicated.
You wouldn't believe how impossible it sometimes seemed to me to get just a basic classic rock tone (Heaven by Bryan Adams, for example). It always had this "honk" to the sound or a harshness to it and sounded very dense.
Anyway, the FM9/FM3 has a real advantage in clarity, even for dirtier sounds. It just sounds like more granular in that the added detail is there in the time. And unlike the endless tweaking and patch buying I did with the Helix, the FM9 comes with some excellent factory presets. This was comforting as a new user--I could enjoy all of the "in the box" tones while learning to create my own blocks at my own pace.
It just seems a lot easier to get stuff dialed in IMHO. There's a larger sweet spot. Whereas the Helix I felt sorta like there was a small sweet spot and if you deviated from it too much you went from a good tone to a crummy tone just like that.
Guys get great tones out of the Helix and they are on YT, but I'm telling you, it isn't worth the $1,699 they want for the Helix floor. That's ridiculous that they are priced the same as the FM9. After having the Helix for over 5 years (and selling it to a buddy for $1,000) I can say that $1,200-1,300 would be a reasonable new price. It seems laughable to me that the Helix and FM9 are priced the same.
Also, the UI is not nearly as hard to grasp as everyone says on the Fractal. Sure, Helix is easier to edit on the unit, I'll give them that. But 95% of the time I'm editing my presets on the computer. I much prefer this to bending over and finding with the unit anyway (though technically with the Helix you can use pedal edit mode). I'm not going to be making huge wholesale changes at a gig, the performance page is usually gonna be sufficient and if not I can go into the full blocks. It's not as elegant as the Helix, but it does the job, and how else are they supposed to do the UI when the FM9/FM3 have so many more parameters? I mean I bet you have 40+ knobs you can tweak in the amp block alone when you look at all the pages! Plus I much prefer the knobs look in the Fractal editor vs the sliders in HX Edit/HX Native.
Plus it's no contest regarding software imo. Fractal wins hands down on the editor side of things.
The reverbs and delays are better imo in the Fractal (plus way more of them to choose from and better spacey reverbs).
I feel like the choruses and rotary sounds are a little better than I had in the Helix, but it's not leaps and bounds better. I never did have any gripes with the FX blocks in the Helix--it was always the core tone I had trouble with (outside of clean tones).
That being said, Fractal has more of everything for effects and more parameters.
You don't HAVE to use those extra parameters, it often sounds great out of the box, but those extra parameters are there if/when you want/need to use them.
The other advantage the Fractal has is more compact size. Even when you add in an EV-1, you are still at a much nicer compact size vs the Helix floor.
Another plus for the Fractal is DSP allocation and workflow:
The Helix Floor is divided into two separate SHARC chips from what I understand. So you have the top half and the bottom half on the screen. Yes, you can feed the top two lines into the second chip in the bottom, but it gets messy and hard to keep track of what's what.
The Fractal solution is far more elegant. Four amps per channel and not take up any additional DSP even when all four amps are loaded? Yes, please! Sure, there's a gap when switching but who cares? And yes, I've heard there's a way to avoid the gap, but it does seem like a bit of a hassle. Plus IIRC the Fractal has dedicated reverb and delay DSP allocation separate from everything else. I don't think I've got that 100% correct but yeah. Generally speaking, I can get a lot more use out of the DSP in the FM9 than the Helix. Seemed like the Helix ran out faster and again, part of that is due to the two separate chips/lines thing.
Anyway, sorry, way too long-winded here, but the Fractal is easily superior imo.
