Old thread, but thanks for waking it up. I've been using the Classic CC version of Lightroom, so standalone desktop subscription, since it came out. However, I bought a couple of others to see if they would be alternatives. I got in on early bird specials on both. On1 Photo Raw and Skylum Luminar. Luminar had been promising a DAM (digital asset management) piece for a while and I was getting tired of waiting. That finally released and I'm under-impressed. On1 is faster for culling images and is very simple for DAM. It uses sidecar files for edit tracking. Editing in On1 is simple, Luminar is a bit more involved, but lots of features. One being layers, which Lightroom doesn't have. So you can do some edits on one layer and others on another layer and then turn certain layers off or remove them. Lightroom you can only step back through changes in history or just manually reset a change. Luminar also works as a plug in to Lightroom, which is nice for some of the effects they have.
However, Lightroom is still the king of asset management. It's catalog and keywording is way better than the other two. ON1 is going to/has a tool to migrate some info from LR catalog to their system, but I haven't tried it yet. It ia a one time transfer so I wanted to wait until after the holidays to do it.
If you just want a good editor for more than the occasional phone image, Luminar and On1 are good choices.
And yes, this means I'm still paying a subscription and bought two other products and paid for an upgrade to each. Each purchase was 1/2 to 3/4 the price of the LR subscription and the upgrades to those purchases were about 3/4 the price of the original purchase. So in real dollars, LR has been $120 a year. Each of the others has averaged $60 a year when you pay for upgrades. So half the cost. Of course, for me, it has worked out like two subscriptions for LR since I'm buying and upgrading two other products.
And I'm staying with Lightroom.