While ACF is the popular choice, Meta Box Pro is the “Developer’s Framework.” I choose this for high-performance architectures because of its modularity. Unlike other plugins that load their entire codebase globally, Meta Box allows me to enable only the specific extensions I need.

This keeps the memory footprint incredibly low. It allows me to define custom post types and fields using PHP arrays, which can be stored in the theme files for version control. It supports custom database tables for storing meta data, which drastically reduces query time for large directories. It is the logical choice for engineers who treat data structures as code.