I respect all opinions but this, is a stupid debate lol. I mean, Slate who? hahaha...
Waves are the inventors of the audio plugin as we know it 33 yrs ago and never stopped renewing their catalogue ever since. Nuff said.
Cheers

 

Gotta agree with Nuffy: Waves plugins are rock solid. Overall useful tools and lots of them. If i need analog flavor i would not look either for Waves and Slate. I'd Rather use Nebula, PSP and PA/FAL. My wife Buffy also like Waves plugins, even tho she's not an expert. But still make some fire EDM tracks with Waves plugins. Nuff Said!!!

 

If I absolutely had to pick, it'd be waves. Slate makes some decent compressors, but as far as everything else they make, I don't find myself reaching for it as much. Just RBass alone from Waves makes them the choice for me, cause I use that on pretty much everything I make ever! But I might add that I make hip-hop/trap, so if you're making something like Rock or something with more of a live instrument heavy sound, you might reach for something else. I wouldn't know.

Also, I do think limiting yourself to one or the other between these two is not the way to think about it at all though. Just my two cents.

 

Waves quality plugins is not bad as Slate to me..just a simply choice…
I read about good vibes only for waves and not for slate …
I tought slate was a good quality plugins even a good economic choice because the everything plan includes also the everything ssl. Yes, is ilok and not cracked yet…
Maybe the waves choice is the one because they are always up to date at sister site?
As a mac user i will never buy again a single waves plugin since this company is a scam with update plan is a shame and i use to uppdate only few plugins, i own the legit horizon bundle and some recent plugins…i own the everything bundle by slate and sll and sincerely…
No waves no slate..im a ssl user now

 

Don't know about R2R but with VR's waves use can use waves central as you would if you were rich. Tick the boxes of just the ones you want.

 

you can always try UAD native. they sound pretty good. but all of them are just ok if you don't know what you're doing. none of them are magic bullets. sister site will probably have you covered for all save for UAD. Waves ditched the vst2 in their last upgrade so i'm kinda letting them go. I have way too many old mixes with waves vst2 and there's not 6months going by where i don't get a recall from clients so i can't justify keeping a machine just with those or having to go back and forth installing old and new versions. So until they get a way of converting automatically my vst2 to vst3 i'm not going forward with them. great plugins though. have been my main workhorses for years, but this vst2/vst3 broke the camel's back (they also did that with dx but that's before my time.). So now I turned to UAD native and have been getting good results (same I did with waves mind you. just different scalpels)