Better for what?

Do you want to earn airline miles you rentals? Or do you want to earn a free rental day (not including all sorts of taxes & fees, not valid for credit card insurance but also not including insurance of its own, etc)? I find the latter to be pretty worthless, because of the restrictions, at least at Avis.

Avis (at least in Preferred and First):

(a) Won't let you earn free rental nights in most cases if you choose to earn airline miles. You have to do several rentals in which you earn nothing to earn a single so-called free rental day.

(b) Unless you earn enough free rental days to do complete rentals, they're not particularly useful, because a 5-day rental typically costs the same as a 7-day rental, for example, and so making it a 5-day rental plus 2 free rental days instead a 7-day rental saves you absolutely nothing! I guess it works best if you sometimes have need of just one-day rentals.

(c) The free rental day certificates expire too quickly for me. I had two of them for half a year, and never had a one- or two-day rental that I needed during that time. So they expired without me being able to use them!

(d) I have a credit card that provides primary collision coverage, but only if I pay for the rental in full with that credit card. Obviously, a free rental day on which the credit card is only used to pay the taxes, fees, add-ons, etc isn't going to qualify for that coverage, so you'll have to rely on your own personal car insurance on those rentals.

(e) Meanwhile, Avis keeps having very lucrative bonus promos, like 3000 AA bonus miles for 3+ day rental or even 1000 AA bonus miles for 1+ day rental. And last year they had a 5000 DL bonus miles for I think 4+ day rental which went on for about half a year.

(f) Given that I always earn miles on every rental, I have not seen a single additional benefit to the "First" status level I earned last year. All the perks of First (for mileage earners) are the same as the perks of Preferred.

Now, if you can find a rental car company which has real perks for status (perhaps free GPS or whatever), let us now. They seem to max out at "one class upgrade, when available" which btw seems rarely available for those reserving higher classes of cars (though it usually works for me to reserve economy aka subcompact and actually get a compact).

The one good thing about Avis (besides the frequent hefty mileage bonuses) is that Preferred is free, and bypasses the counter (after your first rental, and except one counter visit needed each time you change your credit card). But I think you already have something extremely similar with Budget's FastBreak, no? (Hertz, OTOH, requires something like $50/year to be able to bypass the counter.)