They had a good panel on this topic at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami: https://youtu.be/CTytHNi_zHg

You forgot to mention LDK which is seeing more and more use as time goes on. Also IMMORTAN which @fiatjaf is fond of.

A similar question was asked awhile ago, but focused more toward devs: #13364

Here was my answer to why we use LND for SN. I'm really curious about what's going on in other impls though.

For SN, we use LND. It'd be wrong to call it my favorite, because I hadn't and still haven't really evaluated the alternatives. It just seemed more developer friendly (again, it might not actually be because I have no basis for an evaluation).

Retrospective reasoning:

1. I could build and run it on my mac
2. it had a gRPC interface and easy to use javascript wrappers
3. the slack was active with people from a variety of skill levels and questions were answered quickly
4. they have tons of documentation and developer guides
5. it seemed like most developers were building on top of it vs other impls lightning is the sole focus of the company behind it and that made me feel more confident that the project would continue to improve and exist
6. I've programmed a lot in golang recently and felt more confident in my ability to deal with builds and any required customization/contributions in the future (while I've programmed more in C than golang, and even prefer programming C, golang is notoriously dull and free of magic so reading/modifying someone else's go code is more approachable than someone's C code)

From 2019 until now I used LND and CLN. I may need to run a ECL too. I would not say what I like, because that is a personal choice. But I will say this:

• what is more practical: LND
• what is more reliable: CLN

If LND guys will not start fixing more things in LND than adding more stuff, then LND will collapse. LND has patches over patches...

CLN during these years was building slowly but steady and keeping a good pace with fixing things first before going to introduce a new feature. Also the modular way with plugins is much easier to control.

Right now I run both.

Here are a couple recent posts that you may find relevant.

How Bitcoin’s Leading Lightning Implementations Are Expanding Functionality | Bitcoin Magazine #20529 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bitcoin-lightning-network-expanding-function

Core Lightning: How Blockstream’s Implementation Rebrand Speaks To Its Long-Term Vision For Bitcoin | Bitcoin Magazine #20506 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/blockstream-core-lightning-bitcoin-rebrand

I am glad there are multiple implementations LND has been so focused on making announcements and providing half-arsed guides and updates, kind of annoys me. Their lightning was the first wallet I messed with, and they just shut it down like wtf lol

LND is a batteries included setup and seems to be the industry standard. Has the most solid third party integration and support, lndconnect, and macaroons out of the box.

Clightning requires more finesse to setup. You have to tinker with additional plugins, rest API, and other things. But they are innovating with new stuff for BOLT12 like onion messages.

I haven't really used eclair outside of Polar App. It is next on my list to try out!

I don't like that the people in LND act as if they were the official implementation of Lightning.

That's why I think c-lightning is worth supporting and the renaming into core-lightning is some kind of joke towards LND.