I've spent time with a few profiling applications. For commercial support, the only serious contenders are i1P, CoPrA, and BasicColor Print. All the rest are orphanware at best. There are lower-end products such as the X-Rite ColorMunki or Datacolor SpyderPrint however these are not in the same league as i1P, et. al.
First, do you need RGB profiles only or are CMYK (and, if you're appropriately crazy, multicolor)? I can't recommend i1Profiler for anything other than RGB. Either of the other two commercial products easily outperform i1P for CMYK and Argyll does a better job still.
My experience with CoPrA is that it handles out of gamut colors distinctly better than does i1Profiler. Tonal separation is improved and hue angle shifts minimized. On the flip side, i1Profiler tends to give smoother shadow and highlight tones with fewer artifacts or bands. Depending on the image, CoPrA can be either spectacular, colorimetrically more accurate but with more jarring visual flaws, simply horrible or a combination of the three. Interestingly, many of CoPrA's RGB profiling flaws are not apparent with CMYK profiles.
You do need to pony up for more than the basic package to obtain useful functionality. The “M” version at $1650 is the lowest one I recommend as it allows using custom profile settings. I see little point in the “L” flavor, particularly at $5K, since it only adds DeviceLink support. Argyll has more DL functionality and it’s free. The ability to do serious profile tuning only arrives with the “XL” version at $9K. Yes, printer profiling is a niche market but that’s serious cash.
BasicColor Print offers intriguing options. (Full disclosure: The last version of BC Print I used was from almost two years ago). There are a number of gamut mapping and compression options that allow tweaking the profile to accommodate a wide range of inks and papers. BC Print makes for more visually pleasing prints on low contrast or gamut substrates than does i1P. Taking a cue from ProfileMaker and Argyll, BC Print includes software compensation for UV brighteners. Not quite as accurate as the OBA module in i1P for a single specific light source, but a hell of a lot easier and faster. It also allows adjusting for arbitrary illuminants.
Licensing of BC Print is an archaic PITA. The software code ties the software to a single computer. No moving the i1P dongle or i1Pro to another system and proceeding. Instead the license needs to be transferred “permanently”, which requires manual intervention by Basiccolor. Making matters worse, the license tends to fail randomly, can't be preserved when upgrading o/s or system hardware, etc. Dongles are available in theory, but good luck finding a vendor.