Much (read: nearly infinitely) better.
A hardware wallet derives its entropy from its chipset, and an added ingredient from your local PC (which after it is derived, is of no use to anyone). The encrypted seeds are then stored on the hardware wallet, offline. When accessing the blockchain, and signing transactions, your private key (represented by your seed words) are injected into the blockchain, via an encrypted tunnel, bypassing any interface that you are using. Unless you sign by physically pushing the buttons on the hardware wallet, you cannot sign a transaction (unless you have granted access to an attacker, by pushing the buttons prior, that is).
Versus creating your seeds on a soft wallet?
The entropy occurs on your browser app/ PC (heaven forbid, your phone). And then you write them down....and reinstall the soft wallet....THEN WHAT? You would have to re-introduce your seeds into the soft wallet to do anything. And this is where you break the Cardinal Rule of typing in your seeds into the interface....on a keyboard....or on a virtual keyboard, on your phone. This is a NO-NO....because we live in the age of keyloggers and Mars Stealer, which is a free/ low cost attack that infects the user, finds the seedstore file (on your local machine) and then waits until you enter your password, which just so happens to be the same password to decrypt the seedstore file, packages it up, sends it home to the attacker, and covers its tracks.
Good hardware wallets can either generate or accept a 24-word seed, as opposed to a 12-word seed AND utilize a Passphrase, which ups your game by an order of several magnitudes.
There is no contest.
You can try to think your way around it until you're blue in the face....or you can trust the method of encryption, entropy, secure storage, being offline and the mathematical advantage associated with the Passphrase.
A seed can also be generated by a hardware wallet, you can then backup your seeds and Passphrase offline....factory reset the hardware wallet and keep your wallet absolutely cold. The difference is....when it comes time to interact with the account, you can SECURELY recover your backed up seeds to the hardware wallet! You are not typing them into any keyboard, and therefore are not open to the keylogger or Mars Stealer-style attack.
I'm pretty sure you can get even more information on the
Trezor.io site. And no, I am not compensated by them in any way.