As far as my experience, I have one of these older Kompletes and - after trying every single patch in all of its programs, I only use Kontakt of the whole shebang anyway because most of the other things sound unpleasant to my ears. The full version Kontakt 5 first appeared in Komplete 8, so if you keep scouting for deals, perhaps it's possible to snag an older, full (Version 8 or 9) Komplete for less. If Kontakt Player could play those, then buying something like this $49 Komplete Elements set on eBay would be an awesome deal, but - no such luck. The issue with Kontakt Player is that a lot of sample libraries won't work with it, they require the full version of Kontakt 5. I have both now and still use both samplers about equally, for quite different use cases. If it was me (always being tight) I would get Sampler plus Kontakt Player (for the great libraries) first and think about upgrading to the full Kontakt later. But if you are into really advanced stuff Kontakt can get you even further, since it has its own build in scripting language, sound effects, audio routing options, step sequencer and Arp etc. BUT these sections of Kontakt are not very user friendly and accessible. Kontakt is also insanly good for sound shaping. All of this perfectly integrated into Live and with full representation of (almost) every parameter on Push. If you want a great lightweight sampler, that has lots of really cool sound mangling options (an extra OSC section, a SampleSelector for use as 128s etc.). (Seriously it's like owning a vst, that you can just look into how it's made and change almost anything about it ) If you want that, plus the ability to look behind the scenes in all these patches and remake them according to your wishes. If you want a sampler that plays lots of premade multisampled content with often great looking GUIs you want Kontakt (but for that use case the free Player would be sufficient).

Kontakt vs sampletank