Definitely the way to go for route planning and sharing. One feature I like is the ability to pin routes from others to your account. As long as the owner keeps the route public, any change made will be reflected in the pinned route. Great for sharing routes among a group and allowing everyone in the group to get updates without each member having to resave an updated route.
One thing I don't like is that you only get turn by turn for routes created with the route planner. If you convert a ride track as a route for future use, you don’t get turn by turn and the features that would allow you to add turn by turn after the fact are not available in the free membership.
I generally find the distance data for ride tracking to be accurate, but other data..elevation, calories burned, etc, are often way off.