I used other stuff BEFORE nero, so nero was my act of rebellion. However, nowadays it just seems to be the perfect one.
If you want one by another company that is decent, look into CeQuadrant's WinOnCD. It came with another burner and I really liked it, but the old version I had had a bug with AMD's 750 chipset so I stopped using it. Before that however, it was perfect and the newer version rocked.
Don't use adaptec. You'd be better off manually trying to burn millions of holes in a CD than getting that POS software to work