DuckyPad Pro vs Xencelabs Quick Keys: An Honest Macropad Comparison

I’ve been testing macropads for a while now. Different sizes, different layouts, different philosophies, and after working through a bunch of them, two made it to the finals. The DuckyPad Pro and the Xencelabs Quick Keys. These two are interesting because they take completely opposite approaches to the same problem. One gives you 20 keys, two rotary knobs, and stores everything on a micro SD card so you never need to run software.

The other gives you eight keys, the best scroll wheel I’ve ever used on any Macropad, and polished companion software that makes setup genuinely easy. Both have screens, both have physical dials, both cost around $100, and only one of them is still on my desk. I’ll be honest, it isn’t the one I expected, and I’ll get to why. But first let me show you what the Quick Keys gets right, because it gets a lot right. The best scroll wheel I own the Xencelabs Quick Keys, is a slim, narrow device.

Think of it like a chocolate bar with buttons. It’s about 6 inches long, half an inch thick, and weighs Almost nothing at 142 grams. And this form factor is actually one of its strengths. If you use a split keyboard like I do, the Quick Keys slides perfectly into the gap between the two halves. It just fits.

The screen is a 3.12-inch OLED that shows your current shortcut labels. You get eight physical keys with five switchable sets, so that’s 40 shortcuts per application, plus four programmable dial modes. On top of that, the screen supports four different orientations, which is a pretty nice touch. But the standout feature is the scroll wheel. I have to give this to the Quick Keys.

No contest. This is the best physical dial on any Macropad I own. It’s smooth, it’s precise, and you can assign it to zoom, scroll, brush size, timeline, scrubbing, whatever your application needs for video editing. Scrubbing through a timeline with this wheel feels really natural, and the configuration software deserves credit too. It’s well designed, assigning shortcuts is intuitive, you can see your layout clearly, and setting up different profiles per application is really straightforward.

Coming from some of the other macropads config tools that I’ve used, the Quick Keys software felt like a relief. So you’ve got a great form factor, the best scroll wheel, a solid screen, and good software. If this were the whole story, the Quick Keys would have won easily. But there’s a catch. Actually, there are a few.

The first issue is the companion software. The Quick Keys requires a driver agent running in the background on your machine at all times, you can if the agent isn’t running, the device doesn’t work for a macropad that feels like a trade off that shouldn’t really exist. And this connects directly to the second problem, which is the wireless. The Quick Keys connects wirelessly through a dedicated USB dongle, not standard Bluetooth. In theory, you plug in the dongle power on the device and it connects.

In practice, when I turned on the Quick Keys without the USB cable attached, it wouldn’t always find the connection. I’d end up plugging it in via USB C, waiting for it to connect, then disconnecting the cable. And then the wireless would work fine every time. Looking at the setup instructions now, I think this is because the driver agent needs to be running before the device can pair through the dongle. So the wireless issue and the companion software issue are actually the same issue.

If I’d been more patient with making sure the software was always loaded at startup, this might have been less of a problem. But that’s kind of the point it if a device needs that level of patience and troubleshooting to just connect, that’s friction. And friction is the opposite of what a macropad should be. The third issue is key count. Eight Keys I used the Quick Keys for editing some videos, and I kept bumping up against the limit.

Yes, there are five sets of shortcuts you can switch between. And yes, I admit I probably could have organized my video editing shortcuts across a couple of those layers more carefully. But my patience ran short. When I’m in the middle of editing and I need to hunt for a shortcut across multiple layers, the device is slowing me down instead of speeding me up. Now here’s the thing.

The Quick Keys is actually an excellent device for a specific kind of user. If you’re an artist working with a Xencelabs pen tablet or pen display, or a Wacom tablet or or even an iPad with a drawing workflow, the Quick Keys makes a lot of sense. A few shortcut keys and a precise scroll wheel sitting next to your drawing surface with intuitive software that configures quickly. That’s the use case that this was designed for. And for that audience, I’d recommend it without hesitation.

But for everyday productivity and video editing at a keyboard, it just didn’t really stick. 20 keys and a Micro SD card the DuckyPad Pro looks different from the Quick Keys. It’s a chunky 4x5 grid of mechanical keys with Cherry MX Hot Swap sockets per key, RGB lighting, two rotary encoders at the top and a 1.5-inch OLED screen in the corner where the Quick Keys is slim and polished, the DuckyPad Pro feels kind of like a maker project, because it is. It’s designed and sold by an independent maker called Deku Nukem, available on tindy for about $85, and the philosophy behind it is completely different from the Quick Keys. Everything on the DuckyPad Pro is stored on a Micro SD card inside the device.

Your profiles, your macros, your key assignments, your colors all of it lives on that card, which means you never need to run a companion app. You never need software in the background. You plug the DuckyPad in or connect over Bluetooth, and it just works with whatever you last configured. That alone is a huge deal for me. After the Quick Keys dependency on its driver agent, having a macropad that works without any software running felt like a weight lifted.

Honestly. The DuckyPad Pro supports up to 64 profiles with auto switching based on your active window, you can store over 3,700 macros and the scripting language Ducky Script is turing complete, which means you can automate things that go way beyond simple key combinations. It’s powerful in a way that most Macropads just aren’t. I have a dedicated video editing layer on mine, with about 15 active shortcuts. Split and select left, Split and select right on the top row.

Those two keys alone get used constantly align clip commands for flying elements in from any direction, text insertion with style presets, even simple things like paste and shift duplicated on the pad so my hands don’t have to travel as far. The screen shows me what every key does and the layer name at the top, so I rarely get lost. The two rotary encoders sit at the top. I have the lower one set to volume control and the upper one to horizontal scroll. Having dedicated knobs for these is great.

So that’s the good, but I need to be honest about the bad, because the bad is notable. The DuckyPad Pro configuration app is something I genuinely dread opening on macOS. You don’t just double click an app. You open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you downloaded the configurator and type bashrun sh to launch it. That’s fine for me, since I live in a terminal anyway, but for anyone who’s never opened a terminal before, this step alone is a bit of a wall.

Once the app is open, you assign keys by manually typing in keypress codes. The app links you to a support page that lists all the key codes which you then type into the fields. It works, but it’s the opposite of intuitive. Compare this to the Quick Keys software where you just click a key and type the shortcut that you want. The color settings for the per key RGB are hit or miss.

Sometimes they save, sometimes they don’t. I’ve set colors, closed the app, reopened it and found them reverted. And there’s a strange bug where you click on the application window and it just doesn’t respond. Nothing happens until you physically grab the window and move it slightly and then it works. Fine.

I’ve gotten used to it, but every time it happens I think about how weird this would be when for a first time user all of these quirks together create one big problem. I procrastinate on making changes to my Macropad. I’ll think I should add a shortcut for that and then not do it because I don’t want to deal with the configurator. There’s an alternative path where you edit the text config files directly on the Micro SD card and honestly I should probably switch to that or just feed my config into claude code or codecs and have it make changes for me. But either way the official software is a weak point.

The rotary encoders have their own issues on macOS. I wanted one of the knobs set to horizontal scroll, but there isn’t a clean keypress code for horizontal scroll that works reliably on macOS. And if you haven’t turned off natural scrolling in your system settings, the scroll up and scroll down key codes can work in reverse. It’s the kind of thing that’s solvable once you know about it, but it adds to the pile of small frustrations. I will note that the DuckyPad Pro is developed by one very skilled guy, and although I dislike the software, there is no doubt that it is extremely configurable.

It allows control over macros and key presses in a way that no other macropad really allows for, in my opinion. Ducky Script seems like it was made for injecting payloads using dodgy USB sticks for hacking and pen testing purposes, and frankly, I just find it impressive. I just don’t think I could get a friend with average tech skills to reliably get it working in a single afternoon without assistance. However, it’s one of those two things can be true at the same time situations. I’m impressed by the software, but I dislike it.

So here we are. One macropad with a great scroll wheel, good software and polished hardware that couldn’t stay connected reliably and felt too limited on keys and another macropad. And with 20 keys, a powerful scripting engine, and zero software dependency wrapped in the worst config app I’ve ever used, the DuckyPad Pro wins. Not because it’s a better designed product overall. In terms of industrial design, fit and finish, and software quality, the Quick Keys is clearly ahead.

If someone handed me both boxes unopened, I’d probably assume the Quick Keys was the better device. But the DuckyPad Pro wins because its strengths hit where it matters. For my daily work, 20 keys means I don’t need to think about layers for my most used shortcuts, the Micro SD storage means no software agent, eating memory, or failing to start. The screen tells me what everything does, and despite the painful config process, once you’ve set it up, the device itself is rock solid. The Quick Keys is a genuinely good device for artists and anyone working with a drawing tablet.

If you use a Xencelabs pen display, a Wacom tablet, or any touch based creative tool, having that scroll wheel and those eight clean shortcuts next to your work surface is excellent. That’s the use case it was built for, and it delivers for keyboard driven productivity and video editing. The DuckyPad Pro is my pick. It’s the one that stayed on my desk, and this is the part I want to end on, because testing these two Macropads along with a bunch of others over the last couple of years has given me a pretty clear picture of what a great Macropad actually needs. It needs enough keys that you’re not constantly cycling through layers, but not so many that you’re hunting for the right one.

It needs a scroll wheel or dial because once you’ve used one for video editing or browsing, going back to shortcuts for scrolling feels like a step backwards. It needs a screen because labels matter when you have multiple profiles. It needs configuration that doesn’t require a computer science degree to set up, and it needs to work without software running in the background. No single Macropad that I’ve tested gets all of this right, which is exactly why we’re building one at inputzen. We’re designing a Macropad called the BuildBox, and everything I just described, every frustration, every feature I wished existed, every lesson from testing devices like these is going directly into that design.

If you want to follow along with how that’s shaping up, there’s a link in the description if macropads, keyboards, or just building tools that make creative work faster is your thing subscribe. There’s more of these comparisons coming and more of the buildbox journey. So get subscribed. Subscribe so that you don’t miss any of it. Until next time, stay Zen.