Best plugin for managing meta data in the backend

I’ve been using ACF free and PRO for years. It’s even replaced Custom Post Type UI in my installs since ACF added custom post type creation and management (with the only difference I’ve needed is that if you need to change the post type’s slug and migrate posts from the old one to the new, ACF does not handle that yet while CPTUI has been for years).

I’ve found it to be incredibly user friendly for my content editors in WordPress backoffice and developer friendly for me! I’ve not had any issue figuring out their documentation either.

My only critique, and it doesn’t even hurt the star rating because it’s not something I’d expect their plugin to handle, is that it can easily bloat your postmeta and termmeta data tables if you have a lot of fields and a lot of posts with data in those fields. Having a lot of rows can slow your queries and ultimately affect the site’s overall performance so one of my current projects is finding a way to move the ACF data into their own tables in the database without losing functionality.