Handmade vs Machine-made The essential difference between handmade and machine-made cigars lies in the fact that, on the whole, most machine-made cigars aren't made with long fillers (fillers which run the whole length of the cigar) but with short fillers, which make the drawing and burning quality (they burn faster and become hotter) significantly inferior. The quality of wrappers on machine-made cigars is also usually inferior to those used on the best handmade. Handmade cigars are so much more expensive than machine-made quite simply because they take longer to make, are labor-intensive, and use much more expensively produced and matured leaves. The hand making process also leads to wastage.