For vanilla minecraft, the default launcher from Mojang themselves is fine but lacks support for mods (since you have to download those seperately alongside the mods you want to add). However, if you are serious about modding the game: Prism, ATLauncher, Curse Forge are preferred since those have the loaders (Forge, Fabric) integrated.
i like the prism launcher, it allows me to download mods, recource packs, shaders, and even whole modpacks, have multiple instances of my game so i can have diffrent modded versions, and a few other niffy features like a cat button.
Also the Prism Launcher automatically separates new instances into separate folders (So that you don’t accidentally open a world with missing/extra mods). The vanilla launcher can do it to, but you have to manually change the folder location.
The vanilla launcher lets you use mods, shaders, resource packs, behaviour packs
The other launchers support things like mod packs, or they make it easier to install mods
can you have multiple instances through the vanilla launcher?
Yes you can but it’s kind of hidden.
In Prism, it’s super easy to set up an instance, throw in a mod loader, and filter, download, and update compatible mods in the app. It also allows you to choose and configure the Java version easily per instance, view logs, and export instances.
It also has the cat button, which shows a cat :3
Cat button?