Phoenix is really great. Just be sure to start off with a sizeable channel. For instance if you think you'll be spending 100k sats in the next few months, maybe open a 300k sat channel.
Running Albyhub is pretty easy, its like 12 bucks a month or something and you can run it in the cloud, connect to a large lsp like zeus or something and then voila your running your own lightning node in the cloud, can connect different wallets to it like coinOS or Alby Go or Zeus, I set it up around 5 months ago again, havent really touched it, the thing just works, litterally just have 1 lightning channel.
I've been using Breez as a "physical" one, for transactions with friends and/or in shops in my area. I like the interface and the integrated POS. But I'm a little intimidated with the key storage in my Google account. My main problem with it is that when you don't use it regularly, it ends up struggling to find routes and then the tx just don't go through.
I use Alby for anything online. It's great but it evolved so much I got super confused. At the beginning it offered the hosting but now it forces you to either run your own node or get one on their cloud. I get the idea and it's still a great and very complete product but yeah, I'm often confused by it.
I also use the bots on Telegram (sats.mobi), usually to show friends, because it doesn't require them to install anything else. Main problem is you never know when they'll shut down activity and then I have to track all my friends and hurry them to save their sats. In many cases, they did nothing and lost their stack (luckily it's never big but you get the pain).
I also been messing around with LNBits, to create faucets, sats giveaways, QR Codes, NFC cards. It's really a great product.
I onboarded many friends on different ones, Breez, Muun, Wos, Phoenix and the problems are kinda similar to me. When they don't use them regularly, they encounter problems. While the custodial ones are reliable and work flawlessly even after a year of no usage.
I'm mitigated because, sadly, I encountered many problems at running my own node (yeah, I'm regarded) and so for me, custodial Lightning is still the easiest and more reliable.
So it's always the question of the delicate balance between easy and complete, custodial and non custodial. What is the best for the masses, can they up their brain or does it always have to be made for regards with the trade-off it comes with...
Blixt, because it's more reliable for me with background-ran LND than Zeus at the moment, not sure why I cannot get the latter to run consistently in the background.
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