You should evaluate both. Hardware ray tracing is the future, but for now we still have cases where software ray tracing is either required due to hardware constraints or is faster.
Hardware ray tracing has higher quality, especially in reflections. It’s also more flexible as it supports HLOD (World Partition HLOD) for extended GI/Reflection distance, skeletal meshes, hit lighting (can bypass surface cache).
Software ray tracing is supported on all hardware and is more efficient, especially with scenes containing lots of overlapping meshes (e.g. dozens of overlapping rocks).
That’s the current state. In future we would like to work on bringing those two closer together - making hardware ray tracing faster and improving quality of software ray tracing.