So I see a lot, and I mean a lot of people on forums trying to decide between these two options to level their trucks. In my opinion both are great options and both have their pro's over the other. Let me start off by saying, if you have the money I'd highly recommend using these to level your vehicle over a spacer. While spacers are definitely a budget friendly option, they do have their downfalls.
First off, they aren't adjustable. Basically meaning if you ever want to change height, you'll need to buy and install a new spacer. Whereas with the adjustable shocks, once you have them you can change the height later without having to buy something else, besides a new alignment. Something a little more major for those who it applies to is the spacers limit up-travel. So if your truck does more than just pavement, this can lead to a harsher ride off the road, and even on it. For those of you who aren't familiar with wheel travel, this implies that when you hit a bump and the wheel cycles up and down to absorb it, it can't go as high, so you feel more of the bump. Another pitfall to these spacers is that they can allow the strut to over-extend during down-travel. So when the suspension goes to fully droop out, it'll allow the shock to extend roughly the thickness of the spacer further than it should. This can cause the ball joints to bind wearing those out faster, cause the upper control arm to contact the coil spring potentially damaging those, damage cv axles from binding, the sway bar end-links from binding, and other things. However, don't get me wrong, these spacers still have their place in the market. Are they for a truck that's taken off-road frequently? No. But will they be perfectly fine on a daily driven truck that mostly see's pavement? Most likely yes.
Now onto the adjustable struts. Both of these come in at around the same price range and both (as far as I know) come in both unloaded versions and loaded versions with the coil spring already installed. The Rancho's offer one key feature the Bilstein's don't, you can adjust the ride quality. They have a 9 position dial on them to change the ride from very soft to very firm. This is a nice feature to have when your truck has to do many different things. If your towing, you can firm up the ride. Vacation trip? No problem, just soften it up. Taking it off-road? Adjust it again. Basically these cater to the people who like to have complete control of the ride of their truck, which is awesome to have. The downfall to these compared to Bilstein's is I've seen a lot of people reporting that when people set them to get say 2.5" of lift, they end up with less. Not much less, usually like a 1/4" or so, but still I know it bothers some people when they go to level their truck and it comes up a little shy. So far I haven't seen anyone have this same problem with the Bilstein's though. For ride quality on those, you only get one option, and that's firmer than stock. It'll give your truck that off-road vehicle feel to it. Some people love the feel of a firmer riding truck (including myself), some people don't. But at this point it all comes down to what YOU prefer!
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