Lets get serious. We will still hear the occasional call to action about how Natural Gas cooktops are being cancelled by "The Libs", and then a lot of nonsense there after. Lets completely forget that electric cooktops have been around for damn near just as long and many of us are rocking out with the curly windings of a resistive electric cooktop.
Now I'm someone who's had all three of the types of cooktop. I grew up with gas, had electric in my apartments and first home, then upgraded to an induction range. I've had practical experience with all three. Lets go over the pros and cons of each. You can make up your own mind.
Natural Gas
Pros
Works in a power outage: Yep. Been here. Power went out for a couple of days. You turn on the stove valve and light it with a match.
Instant on: When you strike that flame it's instantly on and warming your cookware and the food within.
Easy to control: The flame gives you a visual indicator of how much power you're cranking into your food.
Cons
Newer ranges have poor safety interlocks: Personal experience here. I grew up in a home with a late 70's early 80's gas range. You couldn't really accidentally turn on the valve easily. Brushing against the stove wouldn't result in a valve being opened leaking gas into the house. Now I've had two new ranges since (mid 00's and a late 10's model) that both could easily have their valves opened without striking the burner. I've had to run into a house and shut the valves off and open windows to prevent an explosion multiple times. I've had the valve open on me just walking past the stove and having my rear end brush the knob. I don't know what changed, but I've experimented with this at Home Depot and Lowes and have found this design flaw is rampant with gas ranges. I encourage you to try this out. If your butt can turn on a stove when you walk past that's a bad design.
Heats the pan, not the food: You're waiting on your cookware to warm up before you start cooking. This isn't a problem with thin cookware like stainless steel or teflon coated pans, but as we're trying to get away from flaky toxic coatings and back to reliable non toxic stuff like cast iron this gets to be an issue.
Messy: You ever notice how none of the sites touting how we're cancelling natural gas stoves talk about how much mess they make? You buy a nice set of cookware like copper, stainless steel, or enameled cast iron and after one use it looks like it came out of a coal mine. That soot is a royal pain in the ass to get rid of too. Some "Barkeepers Friend" and a lot of elbow grease will remove it, but why put up with it?
Electric
Pros
Won't blow up your place: Honestly the most I can say here. If you leave a burner on you'll run up your bill and heat your home. As long as you don't have anything near the burner that's all it will do.
Cons
Weird angles: Resistive electric stoves are notorious for being uneven. You wind up cooking at an angle. Each burner doesn't sit flat.
Scratched Glass: Flat top electric stoves get scratched up by your pans. What you think is filth you'll quickly find out is just fine scratches in your finish. It's why most "glass top stove cleaners" are actually just polishes.
You're heating the cookware again: Much like gas you're heating the cookware not the food. As you have no visual feedback its hard to pick a setting.
Slow to warm, slow to cool: As adjustments take time waiting for the heating element to cool adjusting the heat takes time. This is why people with electric stoves frequently move kettles off the element when they're boiling water for tea. Shutting off power doesn't instantly kill the heat.
Power outage you'd better have an alternative or generator: Yea. Without power you're stuck. As Electric ranges are power hungry you'll overwhelm all but the largest generators. Better to leave it off and go out, or grill.
Induction:
Pros
Teflon smeflon: Can't use it. Induction ranges don't heat up. They use a magnetic field to use your magnetic pan as a heating element. Most all Teflon pans are aluminum and as such won't work. You need stainless steel or cast iron. Considering how some conservative news sources are so worried about "chemicals turning frogs gay" you think they'd be more in favor of a range that forces people to use good old cast iron.
Super fast: Boil a pot of water in under a minute. Meals that would take me 30 minutes to make now take under 10.
Easy to control: Temp changes happen almost instantly much like a gas stove.
Energy efficient: You're directly heating your food, not creating heat to heat your pan then your food.
Heats the pan: As you're cooktop doesn't actually get hot you can use silicon mats to protect the surface of your range from scratches and food spills.
Cons
Glass top: If you don't use a silicon mat you will scratch the hell out of the surface like a glass electric stove.
Power outage: Again without power you are stuck. However as these are very energy efficient even a modest generator can power the range. So feel free to fire it up if you have a generator.
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