Best performance for use Custom Field in WP

Neither will be faster because the root of the performance problem is the WP table design, not the plugin. The post meta table is optimised for finding values when you already know the post ID/keys, it’s not designed for searches, though there are mitigations.

Searches/grouping/finding is what the taxonomy tables were created for. Finding all posts that have X category or Y post tag is fast because that’s what those tables are designed for, it’s why tags/etc aren’t stored in post meta.

Shopping around for plugins won’t have any impact on this because they’re still post meta values, no matter what system or framework you used to create them.

What To Do

If you need to search for posts via a meta value, that means either the field should have been a custom taxonomy, or it needs to be recreated in a taxonomy in such a way that it’s easier to search for ( e.g. storing precise values in post meta for display, and bucketed/approximate values in a term ).

So I Should Only use Taxonomy Terms and Never Use Post Meta?

No!!! Using one thing for everything is what got us into this mess in the first place!

Post meta is great for stuff you need to display and store, but it’s not good for searching/filtering. WP will even bulk fetch all the meta that belongs to a post to save time and optimise things. It’s figuring out which posts that’s expensive.

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