AS far as I know, Stihl and Husqvarna are owned by the same parent company.
I was also told that Jonsered was also part of that corporation.
The nice thing about Husqvarna is that you do not have to buy it off a dealer to get it serviced by a dealer. They are very good , honest people to deal with and will honor any warranty.
As far as that goes, I have a small construction company and I take materials back to Lowes all the time - with no question asked, even if it is 6 months old.
The Husqvarna is more of a homeowners chainsaw and the Stihl is an industrial model.
The Stihl requires the right fuel, or you will take the hone out of the cylinder and fry the rings and you will have a whole bunch of nothing.
The Husqvarna is more user friendly and will run on just about any mixed gasoline that you put into it.
It uses ( 90 Weight ) gear oil for bar lube. Ya - you got it - 90 w Gear Oil? No matter how cold it is outside - it will lube the bar and the tank runs out of oil about the same time the engine runs out of fuel. It's always empty!
The Stihl will start up easily as long as you do not store it for long periods of time with fuel in it.
You are better off to dump it out and store it empty - and even run the motor until it runs out of fuel. Doing that, it will last about 40 years!
The Husqvarna also has fuel issues and should be drained, but then again - you can put some Gummout Carburetor cleaner in the fuel and it would probably clean it's self out.
The Jonsered is the Cadillac of chainsaws and will run with a empty tank - upside down. You got to see it to believe it! If you work in the wintertime, heated handlebars are a must. They are damn near indestructible - we had a couple when I worked on a logging crew at a State Park and even with multiple operators - they couldn't kill it! It was that good!
The Stihl will probably cost you more money - since it is a commmercial industrial model, and the Husqvarna will probably do what you want it to do - for as long as you want it to do and still be the better saw for a homeowner in the long run.
The Jonsered - is , was and always will be the best saw I ever ran.
No matter what size chainsaw you buy, but the one with the longest bar you can get!
Think about it like this, the larger the bar, the larger the motor, the heavier the saw gets, the faster the saw gets. Everytime you go to cut anything, need it be a limb or the trunk or just cutting logs.
When you go to cut, what do you do? You bend your back so the blade of the saw can reach the log. The shorter the bar, the further you have to bend. The longer the bar, the less you have to bend.
My very first chainsaw - when I was 11 years old was a David Bradley with a 24 inch bar.
It probably weighed 20 lbs. It probably held 1 quart of gasoline and 1 quart of oil.
You had to manually pump the oil onto the bar.
It had a manual choke and a throttle lock.
It was hard to start at times and would kick back like a mule and didn't have any guards on it or a chain brake.
My dad gave it to my cousin to brush out a lot he bought to build a house and he never brought it back. He said that it had carburetor problems and his neighbor had one just like it and he gave it to him for parts!
I could have killed him!
Buy something that will do the work for you instead of you working for it.
