When comparing Base16 family vs Solarized Dark, the Slant community recommends Solarized Dark for most people. In the question“What are the best VIM color-schemes?” Solarized Dark is ranked 7th while Base16 family is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Solarized Dark is:
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.
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Pros
Pro Contains many color-schemes
Pro Out of the box support for many applications (vim, terminals, etc...)
Base16 template repositories on github have configurations for most popular applications where a color scheme can be applied. This reduces headache for users when applying or switching color schemes.
Pro Its Solarized Dark scheme is compatible with htop
This is just one example of an app that doesn't work with vanilla Solarized Dark (half of the usernames in htop have the same color as the background)
One has to use a patched htop version.
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 Schemes are limited to 16 colors
You may not be able to use as many colors as you want for a particular application without manual manipulation since base 16 color schemes are limited to 16 colors.
Con Each theme needs manual tweaking
The base16 color schemes are really great but as a vim theme they require a lot of manual tweaking to be viable. One example is that in one theme a neon green bg is used with a white fd rendering any part of the vim UI that uses those two colors together illegible.
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.