Hydro is definately more expensive and sometimes more work, depending on your setup. You'll get faster growth and plants will finish up about a week earlier than in soil and you don't have the mess of soil. If you're having success, you should probably stick with soil b/c a switch to hydro requires a pH meter, a TDS/ec meter, different nutes likely, some pH down, maybe some pH up, any other supplemental nutes you want, hydroton/rockwool/lavarocks/or some other medium and the actual hydro setup which may need water or air pumps. When I jumped into hydro, I had no clue the huge startup cost I was going to incur to do it right and keep the plants from dying. About $1500 (not all hydro stuff, my ballast, reflector, timer, ext cords, fans, ion generator, carbon air scrubber, etc.) later and a lot of it wasted b/c I bought stuff I didn't need, I got 2 big plants a week into flowering and doing great. I'm going to stick with hydro for now b/c I have the supplies but I'm going to stick a few more plants in there in soil just b/c it's a little easier to maintain.
