When comparing LILO vs Grub2, the Slant community recommends Grub2 for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux bootloaders?” Grub2 is ranked 2nd while LILO is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Grub2 is:
Only requires 2 commands most of the time (i.e. grub-install ... and grub-mkconfig ...).
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Pros
Pro Supports any filesystem
LILO does not rely on the file system to locate the kernel, instead it points to the first logical sector of the kernel file. Because it practically works around the file system, it supports any file system available.
Pro Compact and fast
Pro Easy to install and setup
Only requires 2 commands most of the time (i.e. grub-install ... and grub-mkconfig ...).
Pro Support for a large number of Operating Systems
Grub can load a large number of operating systems, not just Linux.
Pro Easily locates a kernel file
Grub is very file-system aware. This way, it can easily locate a kernel file which is residing in the file system without having to specify a logical-sector.
Pro Has an interactive CLI
Grub has an interactive command line interface which can be very helpful at times if anything goes wrong during the boot process, especially after a fresh install or after a kernel update.
Pro Supports BIOS
Has BIOS support unlike other bootloaders which only support efi or uefi.
Cons
Con Support will be dropped on December 2015
The maintainer has announced that support for LILO will be dropped on December 2015 because of several limitations of LILO itself. Though development may again restart in the future and the maintainer is looking for people to continue the project.
Con Can only load Linux
LILO (Linux Loader) can only be used to load Linux.
Con Slower boot times
Grub has slower boot times than most other bootloaders.
Con Fully-featured also means harder to wrap your head around
Grub has a lot of features that other boot loaders may not have. But this also means more time spent on the documentation if you want to know the ins and outs of it.