When comparing Gruvbox vs Solarized Dark, the Slant community recommends Gruvbox for most people. In the question“What are the best VIM color-schemes?” Gruvbox is ranked 1st while Solarized Dark is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Gruvbox is:
Three different variants are available, each with different contrasts.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple contrast options
Three different variants are available, each with different contrasts.
Pro Very easy on the eyes
Both the light and dark version have a reddish background for a consistent look when toggling between them.
Pro Have light and dark version
Dark background has brown-yellowish retro colors, light background is yellowish with pastel highlights.

Pro Made ready for multiple text-editors
Ports for Atom, Sublime, TextMate and Emacs and other text editors are available.
For a full list of available ports.
If you are using a Jetbrains IDE.
Pro You can go all day with Gruvbox
Pro It can be customized in detail
Size of the tabs, icons of file types, contrast of the color schemes, accented colors, indentation in the sidebar, sizes of the status bar and dozens more.
Pro There are versions for a lot of applications or it's easy to make your own
There are ready-made packages for Vim, IntelliJ, Emacs, iTerm, etc. If your app isn't supported the website explains clearly what colors are used, so it should be easy to wrap up your own.
Pro It seems that is has been given the most thought
Judging from the description that has been given by the author, it seems that this color scheme has been designed with huge background knowledge about colors and relations between them.
Pro Works well with multiple fonts
Since Solarized has pretty good color separation it's easier to distinguish both thin and bold fonts.
Cons
Con That white is very painful to look at using an F.lux like applications
While it looks quite good for some time, using Night Shift/F.lux applications just makes reading things with Gruvbox quite painful.
Con Too much blue
People caring about the color intensity in their screens, will notice that this theme is not useful for night use. If you use software like Flux to dim the blues in your screen this theme loses its enchant.
Con Low contrast
Comments for example, have very low contrast against the background which makes it harder to read.
Con Vanilla version doesn't work with htop
Half of the usernames in htop have the same color as the background.
One has to use a patched version of htop.
