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I did a quick read of the users guides for Acronis, Macrium, and Paragon.
 
My takeaway was that Macrium's documentation effort was complete and easy to understand. Keeps it simple.
 
The others, not so much.
 
If I had to pick one today, Macrium would be my winner. It does everything I need it to do, and clearly explains how to do it.  The point you made about building the WinPE recovery media is a perfect example.  It just works, right?

Macrium uses Windows shadow copy as part of it's mechanism - at least the previous release did.
Neither good nor bad unless your shadow copy system gets corrupted like mine did.
 
This happened over a year ago - my main laptop was dying and I wanted to backup my data before getting its replacement. I had just recently switched to Macrium and had used it without issue on several of my family's PCs (had a multiple user license).
But when I went to back up my laptop I could not get Macrium to work because my Windows Shadow Copy was disabled and could not be enabled. I ended up reinstalling Acronis and had no problem backing it up.
 
While I use Acronis as my main back system I am not a big fan boy.
I think they put more effort into marketing than in optimizing their software.
I've learned to alternate backups so that I always have more than one recent full back up.  I've had verified as good backups turn out to be corrupt when I needed to use them.
For me doing a full restore can be a pain require both a bootable USB and external USB harddrive. 
I don't plan on upgrading to the latest Acronis version, it has nothing new that interests me.
 
<sigh> reminds me that I need to do a full backup this weekend...
 
 

TheSteven
 
This happened over a year ago - my main laptop was dying and I wanted to backup my data before getting its replacement. I had just recently switched to Macrium and had used it without issue on several of my family's PCs (had a multiple user license).
But when I went to back up my laptop I could not get Macrium to work because my Windows Shadow Copy was disabled and could not be enabled. I ended up reinstalling Acronis and had no problem backing it up.
 

The best solution in this situation is to take an image offline, without booting Windows.  Use your recovery media to boot the PC, and then take an image of the hard drive to your external drive.
 
This can come in handy if you can't even boot Windows.

I used to use Acronis but switched to Macrium (I have paid version) a couple of years ago.  Short story Acronis failed me twice trying to restore it didn't get a third chance. 
 
+1 for the way Macrium downloads and creates the WinPE disc, compared to the clunky and mostly manual operation in Acronis (last version I had was 2012).
 
Acronis was a mess to completely uninstall (I was on Win 7 at the time).  I uninstalled it with Revo Uninstaller Pro, which also searches the registry and left over folders/files.  Even after the Revo uninstall there were many Acronis entries still left in the registry (probably close to 70 or 80) that required manually editing the registry to get rid of.

I'm using Acronis now and will likely switch to paid Macrium at some point.  Cleanup is a nightmare with Acronis and the number of background processes running is beyond reason.
 
I tried to use Acronis to migrate to SSD and it failed flat on its ass at the 99% point.
 
I had been using the free Reflect version up until last year.  I honestly don't remember why I chose to go with Acronis.

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