[imperialdrive]

Uhhh yeah, do yourself a favor, pay no attention to this article. Always buy hydraulic disc brakes whenever possible. The rest of the bike can be whatever, but when it comes to stopping power, you will smile endlessly from the smooth yet responsive safety hydraulic disc brakes provide. They are inexpensive and easy to replace, and need much less maintenance to adjust. Every single time you brake, at all, you will be thankful. The only thing close to as important IMHO is good lights.

[JohnFen]

I love my disc brakes, but I don't like the hydraulic aspect of them. I do wish that they used cables, instead. Those are easier for me to maintain/repair. I only use my bike to commute, though, and I don't think that there's a real difference in performance between hydraulic and cable with that use case so it's all about ease of maintenance for me.

[threeseed]

This is a great guide that includes a list of cable actuated disk brakes. And if it works for bikepacking with the heavier loads it generally works fine for anything.

https://bikepacking.com/gear/best-brakes-for-bikepacking/

[gomox]

Hydraulics are much nicer feeling than cable discs (rim brakes feel way better than cable discs in my opinion). For bikes that you use a lot I think its worth getting hydraulics since you do need to maintain them either way.

I only choose cable discs on bikes I use extremely rarely (i.e. I keep one at my inlaws for when I visit once or twice a year and I wouldn't want to deal with hydraulics maintenance in that context).

[JohnFen]

For the type of riding I do, which is just daily commuting in the city, I have not noticed any performance difference between hydraulics and cable at all. So the only difference that matters to me is how easy the system is to maintain and repair. And for me, cables win on that count.

[micro_cam]

I actually find hydraulic brakes much easier to maintain. They self adjust to account for wear and don’t suffer from cable stretch so I rarely need to adjust them. They need a bleed maybe once every few years but that is actually dead simple for shimano anyways.

[sleepybrett]

They make cable disc breaks and cable actuated hydraulic disc breaks as well.

[JohnFen]

Yes, but I don't hate the hydraulics, I just like cables better, so I'm not going to go to the hassle and expense of changing what's already on my bike. My next bike, though, won't have the hydraulics. Just the discs.

[sleepybrett]

I only mention because I've got a pretty heavy cargo bike (rad power bikes expand) that comes with cable disc brakes that's i've found to be a little under-spec'd and went looking for options. Fully hydraulic seems like a bit of a pain (bleeding etc) and found some 'hybrid hydraulics'. In different forums I found some people that were pretty positive on them so I took a gamble and ordered but have yet to install them, they just showed up last week.