I’ve had really good results with SPAdes for isolate or enrichment cultures when I’m trying to reconstruct just one or a few genomes. But when working with high diversity metagenomic samples, sometimes SPAdes can’t handle it and MEGAHIT is pretty awesome with how well it does with such a small memory footprint – and it’s insanely fast.
SPAdes
MEGAHIT
“Introduction to software for amplicon and metagenomic analysis” (Liu et al., 2021, p. 319) (pdf)
“A selection of quality control software tools for metagenomics data” (Breitwieser et al., 2019, p. 1127) (pdf)
“Metagenomic classifiers, aligners and profilers” (Breitwieser et al., 2019, p. 1129) (pdf)
“Tools for whole-genome assembly and metagenomics assembly” (Breitwieser et al., 2019, p. 1131) (pdf)