All the rips have the same core functions and purpose but each has a few different bells and whistles and ways of doing things. Just like the Adobe / Corel, Chevy / Ford, etc arguments you will find those who viciously hate and talk bad about one and those who sing the praises of one. In reality both are excellent and its more of what you are used to or started with. Some say x rip has better color than y rip, etc. Some are browser based interfaces (these are running a web server software in the background to make that happen), some are standalone programs, some support this machine or that, etc. Interestingly many of the RIPS, behind the scenes, are using APPE (Adobe PDF Print Engine) as the actual core of the RIP itself. Same with the printers. You will find plenty who swear that solvent is dead (eco, lite, etc as well) and that HP latex is gods gift to wide format but at the same time you will find plenty of threads of people having some problem or another with them. Do they have their benefits and can they produce excellent quality prints, absolutely. Solvent ink machines are far from dead, most every brand that had had them in the past, still do and are still to this day developing and introducing brand new models.
Where you hear the loudest screams that this or that is terrible and to run are from the very very small minority few who are having or have had some major problem with whatever it is. Did they get a lemon machine, quite possibly so. You can bet with absolute 100% certainty that EVERY brand has a lemon or some defect or some machine that got mishandled in shipping and slightly bent its frame or something and that user is going to scream on every forums they can that the machine is junk. The far greater majority (on machines, software, media, aftermarket inks, etc) are happy as can be and too busy to spend time posting about how great their whatever is.... my point being, take the naysayers with a very very big grain of salt. Listen carefully to those few who do take them time to praise. You need to evaluate what features are important to YOUR business. Things like how close is the dealer who will be supporting you, how is their reputation for support, does this dealer stock the supplies like ink that you will need, maybe you are a tech whiz and don't care about dealer support because you are likely smarter and more technically inclined than their tech. Does the RIP just print or does it also drive your cutter, does it have profiling built in or are you happy with stock profiles that are optimized for some other machine in some other average environment (average temps and humidity levels play a VERY large part in print quality and profiles account for that), some RIP's have design built in like Flexi which does a great job with print/cut workflow, some RIP's have nice extras like sequential numbering, or banner finishing, or awesome nesting, or specialize in something like fabric printing, or can profile totally custom ink sets. On some RIP's half the things you might want at some point are paid add-ons like profile creation, or working with multiple machines, etc. Some have gone the way of SaaS (software as a service / aka cloud / aka rent your software forever) while some still have a buy it once price and in a couple of years you can pay to upgrade or continue to use it as you do (which probably works just fine).
Its such a common question on here but at the same time a terribly loaded and poor question. The real question requires one to truly evaluate their specific needs and then narrow down the choices based on that.
