Is salt water easier
or better than chlorine?

What you still need to manage: pH, which drifts steadily upward on salt pools, cyanuric acid, and the salt cell itself, which scales and degrades over time.

And the salt. You add salt to the pool when it runs low, which happens slowly with normal use, or faster if there's a small leak somewhere. On a typical pool, we add eighty to a hundred and sixty pounds of salt twice a year.

Is the water "softer"? A little. Most of the smoothness people associate with salt pools comes from cleaner overall chemistry, not from salt itself. For scale: a salt pool runs at roughly ten percent of the salt concentration of the Pacific Ocean, so no, you can't taste it.

Your salt reading isn't measuring salt

One thing that catches people off guard: salt cells don't measure salt content directly. They measure the water's electrical conductivity and convert that into a salinity reading, and conductivity changes with temperature, not just with how much salt is actually in the water.

The same 3,000 ppm of salt can read closer to 3,600 ppm on a warm summer afternoon than on a cool morning, purely because warmer water conducts electricity better. Most quality systems compensate for this to some degree, but not perfectly across the full range, which is one more reason a single salt reading doesn't always tell the whole story.