Late to the party on this one,
I use LR when ever possible as I mainly shoot single row and usually more times than not with a wide angle lens. I have Ptgui (hate the interface, just me I guess) and Kolor. Neither tool has a final warp as LR does, i.e. boundary warp. For my work when LR came out with Boundary warp, I was sold. Some issues however with LR.
1. Currently LR works less than stellar with IQ100 raw images, and if you have images with low exposures LR will often add a harsh magenta color. Same issue on HDR combos with IQ100 files (from Raw).
2. LR seems to work best with raw, but you have to remember not to do any image work prior to the pano merge as LR just strips this off.
3. LR consistently overexposes panos where you are close on highlights. Actually sometimes not even close to blowing them out in the raw file, but LR just pushes them over the edge to pure white. Same raw exported to CC work fine no over exposure. I have opened a few issues
on with Adobe, but this issue goes back to day one and as usual Adobe IMO tends to only make one pass at most of these LR tools.
4. CC doesn't have Boundary warp, and the content aware option IMO is worthless as Content aware can be most of the time unless it's pure sky. Yes you can select all and warp later, but in CC warping can easily cause loss of resolution where as in LR B Warp doesn't.
5. Ptgui always has problems merging solids, like a blue sky taken in 5 or 6 segments, (again for me), even with the separate plugin for exposure I still often get dark lines at the edges of sections. Works better with a sky with clouds for me.
6. Both Ptgui and Kolor give you options for the necessary interpolation which I like, but neither have any warping which to me is a bit lame now. Both programs could use updates, Ptgui is quite old now per the latest update
7. LR allows you to combine HDR dng's into a pano which is a nice feature, however you still have the issue of totally blown high lights.
8. PTgui and Kolor both have more options for the pano creation and some times the strange ones will work better.
I still tend to start with LR, then move to Ptgue lastly Kolor. Kolor claims with their latest release to have fixed some of the exposure blending issues but IMO the program still has a lot of issues when blending a pure or close to pure blue sky. Most of the time, around 70 to 80 percent LR can get it done, and for me I don't see that many issues with wides. I tend to use wides in all my pano work, 14mm to 24mm in 35mm and 35mm to 55mm in MF.
What strikes me the most is LR is very close to IMO a perfect tool, but for the issue of blowing out the highlights and the problems with the IQ100 files which I don't expect a fix for anytime soon. It's nice to be able to take 4 to 6 raw files, convert them to a pano dng, then use the LR tools on the image, before final edit in CC if necessary. I would love to see Capture One get a similar feature LR works OK with tiff output from C1, however for some reason LR many times can't see the lens info from C1 output tiff and thus has trouble with the pano creation and I can still not find a way to add Phase One info to tif files in the optical area of LR. You will get a warning when you try to use LR on C1 P1 tiffs that LR would work better if the optical info was available. This does make a difference BTW will all the pano software as they need to know the lens/sensor info. I know C1 outputs this info but many tools can't see it.
Paul Caldwell