After much testing Houdini Indie is the way to go. It's cheaper, more efficient and powerful. You can also use Houdini engine in C4D or cache out VDB files for volumes that would bring XP to its knees. For example, a sim I set up in Explosia took over 4 hours to export as a VDB with a pretty high Voxel size of 1.5. A more complex sim in Houdini Indie took me 10 minutes to cache out for use in C4D/redshift.
That being said I really like XP for simple easy to understand set ups and projects that you don't need a lot of resolution for. Like @Cerbera mentions, it's nice to have th