Well, it's been almost a year since the last time I was really into UI and it seems like there are a lot more mods that are popular and also not part of the Ace framework or SVN or whatever. As I looked through all of your UI's from the "Post your UI" thread, I noticed many mods that I didn't recognize after going over files.wowace.com extensively which is where I pretty much got all my mods last year.

Anyways, the point of this thread is to talk about your favorite non-ace mods and why you like them. Also, if a mod has an Ace counterpart, explain why the non Ace version is better.

I'll start off by talking about QuestHelper: QuestHelper | World of Warcraft Addons | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com . This mod makes questing very easy by showing you where on the map the quest can be done and even plots the most efficient path to follow as you complete quests around a zone. I haven't noticed anything like this on Ace.

I'm still very much in love with DoTimer from Ash. I picked it up many moons ago about a week after I started playing and found keeping tracks of DoTs a pain in the backside. Since then, I've found that it's a good addon for damn near every class. It's very natty having 3 bars stacked on top of each other for lifeblooming multiple tanks - especially when you can use one of the optional modules to pull the timers out into the middle of your screen.
Also, it keeps track of things that other addons (quartz - which yes, I use for other reasons) don't seem to want to tell you unless you're targetting something - on my mage, when I was AoE farming, I discovered that DoTimer ran a bar for the length of Cone of Cold's chill whenever the spell was fired, irrespective of if you actually hit something - it'll show you a bar if you use it walking down the road - this way of doing stuff also means that you've got a 'life timer' for things like the water elemental - I know down to the second when fluffy's going to hit the dirt, unless he gets prematurely gibbed. Prior to blizzard adding in their own totem timers, it would also note the lifetime of a totem without the need for another addon.

Yes, it hasn't been updated since 2.2.2, but it ain't broke, so it doesn't seem to need fixin'

DoTimer at Curse

OmniCC - cooldown counter. It times everything that has a cooldown, works with just about every bar/bag addon and I don't think it's ever broken

DoTimer: The ability to display cooldowns/timers as an icon instead of a bar, which is a lot more space efficient in many cases.

Bagnon: Looks good, lets you see the inventory/bank of your other characters. Been using it for a very long time and have never had reason to change.

ItemRack: Have tried just about every other gearset management mod, but have always come back to ItemRack. It just works so much better and more intuitively.

OmniCC: As mentioned previously, it works with just about everything.

Ludwig: Like lootlink, but less bad. I've no idea if there's an Ace equivalent though.

Examiner: Voyeur stopped working as of 2.4, so I switched to this. Don't know if there another Ace inspect addon.

Lightheaded: This along with Cartographer_Waypoints is like having Wowhead available in-game. Leveling an alt has never been easier.

TipTac - Simple and easy to understand Tooltip manipulator.

Omni CC - for the simple fact that it always worked and anywhere

I appreciate more or less the way a designer/coder work like Haste (and the forks from Zork and P3lim), Cladhaire, Tekkub, Tuller and Gazmik's work so I end up with mostly their work.

Cooling is what I'd consider one of the nicest cooldown mods out there. It shows your cooldowns in the standard way the Action Bars do, except you can choose to display these in any point on your screen. Perfect if you like how the Action Bars display cooldowns but don't want to clutter up a more central part of your UI with unneeded buttons.

It also supports printing that an ability is ready to SCT, which is nice if you're using SCT as it's one of the things it lacks compared to some of the other scrolling battle text mods.

Also worth noting is ReTeal, it does nothing more than changing the Shaman class color from blue to teal, but I personally find that's invaluable. I like having a dark background on my unit frames, and I find it hard to distinguish the blue color from the background color when using health bars that fill up as someone gets damaged more.

No need to use cartographer if you use TomTom which is also made by the author of Lightheaded.

AzCastBar - awesome casting bar addon. Switched to this from Quartz.

Butsu - loot frame addon from wowinterface

neonchat - colors your edit box and chat box border the color of the channel you are typing in

And I definitely have to make a plug for oAddons by Haste and pAddons by p3lim. Lightweight addons with lua made fairly easy to understand, those guys did a great job. You can find p3lim on wowinterface and some of his mods have the link to Haste's addons.

Any of Tekkub's addons is glorious. Tekkub's Emporium of Random Crap

Also, I love all of Roth's addons, they're super lightweight and lua-edited only. Use then for unit frames and action bars. rothui - Google Code

I haven't been able to figure out how to dl the Roth addons.

I still can't get rid of Auctioneer. Nothing Ace has comes even close to the level of trading advice Auctioneer gives me. I especially like how it records market price of items and adds an extra column when browsing the AH that tells you how good of a deal the auctions are based on it.

QuestHelper is awesome for levelling - it is like LightHeaded with automated coordinates and plugs into Cartographer very nicely - but was very heavyweight when I checked it, going for 15-18% CPU time (other addons use 0.1-0.3% - perhaps it does some optimizing/updating of its routes).
Disable it when you hit 70 and only re-enable it when you want to grind out the last quests.

Simply put, QuestHelper makes quest-levelling an alt a breeze and something you can do even if you are tired - just go where it tells you to go and do what it tells you to do (I ran into one or two quests that it didn't have that kind of directions on - in that case, just mouse over the target on the map and it will light up the relevant section of your map where the mobs are that you need to terminate).

Not an addon but very useful for us with loads of addons - jWoWUpdater which can auto-update not only Ace addons but addons on Curse, WoWUI and WoW Interface as well. It's Java, so it's cross-platform as well.

WoWInterface Downloads : Unit Mods : Clique is awsome for casters

Improved camera!

Forgive me if I'm incorrect, but I use Ludwig and isn't it an Ace addon? Still an excellent loot link mod though.

Mik's Scrolling Battle Text, the original.
Interruptbar, if I ever PvP'd.
SpellAlerter, because Witchhunt is just spammy.
Nurfed Unit Frames, when the new version gets released.
oUF, Otravi's Unit Frames are still very good and easy to modify.
OptionHouse, addon control, memory data and profiling functions.

I use Cartographer for a lot of other reasons. It is, however, Ace.

Nope, it's from Tuller, the author of Bagnon/Bongos/Sellfish/OmniCC.

The entire Nurfed compilation, extremely customizable unit frames and action bars bundle that weighs less than 1mb. There is a mild learning curve, but lots of support on the forums. This set acts as a replacement to Pitbull, Bartender3, Spell Binder, and even Proximo. There are many other nifty features such as auto repair, chat frame enhancements and auto-invite on keyword. It also acts as an addon manager, allowing you to enable or disable addons on the fly with a simple reload. If you combined all the Ace equivalents, the memory usage of ace would far outweigh everything in this bundle.

I swear to mumble as my chat addon. :-)
WoWInterface Downloads : Chat Mods : mumble
(Don't be fooled by the old date, it works flawlessly)

And as mentioned, everything by haste. WoWInterface : AddOns by haste and oAddOns

This thread could be good but it kind of sucks.

Can people actually, you know, explain what these addons do, and why they fill a niche Ace mods currently do not, or are otherwise superior to their Ace counterparts, and so forth? Just listing names of mods is worthless.

TourGuide, for alts, is a very nice questing guide (based on the Kopp/Joana paths for leveling) that interfaces neatly with both Cartographer_Waypoints and TomTom for waypointing.

Available from tekkub's git repository or his googlecode site (tekkub-wow.googlecode.com)

I'm a die-hard Ace fan, but I do strongly prefer Bongos over Bartender. The only major reasoning behind this is the quick and simple "hover and press" keybinding method for Bongos.

Having to go into the UI's default keybinding page, and hoping you get all the right buttons synced to the right keys is a pain when you change your UI with any frequency as I do.