I use a polish daily, and a biga at least a few times a month. I can say for sure that a poolish is easier to deal with than a biga on a number of levels.
A poolish is a 50/50 blend of water/flour (100% hydration) so its very easy to incorporate into your final dough with zero issues. A biga should be done closer to 45% hydration and can be difficult to incorporate into your finial dough. Some end up with lumpy doughs and others mix too long to get the biga incorporated doing damage to the dough.
A poolish works great at just about any temp from fridge to a hot room temp where a biga really should be done at 65 degrees or close to that for best results. Having said that.. 65 degrees is a great temp to use for poolish as well.
I find it much easier to know when a poolish has fermented properly than a biga. With biga it looks the same to me when it has slightly under or slightly over fermented. In my world slightly over fermented preferments or doughs are not allowed!
With a poolish its best to use as soon as it has no longer domed, and you will start to see some cracks on the doughs surface after the doming has stopped. For me its an easy visual to see each time.
One negative I hear is that because a poolish is 50/50 water/flour, unless you are making a 100% hydration dough, you cant use as much of it in the dough as you can a biga where you can make a dough with 100% of the recipes flour from the biga. This is not a problem for me, as I would never want to make a dough with that much preferment in it anyhow. In fact, I actually prefer less preferment in my doughs than most people suggest to use and I still find quite a large flavor boost in doing so.
As far as which is better... they both bring quite a bit more flavor to the table but the flavors are different. For this I won't even attempt to describe the two flavors in words, but as far as I cam concerned they are both just as good as each other. If a large percentage is used and there is an abundance of flavor because of that, I will prefer the poolish which some call "sweeter" over a strong biga flavor which can get a bit funky for me (but its still really great in normal amounts).
Now, its in the texture department where the two differ quite a bit and this might be one reason why someone would strongly prefer one to the other. A biga will make the dough very strong and capable of trapping quite a bit of air. This translates to an airier fluffier dough with a higher rise, but the price here is that the dough can be chewier and not as tender.
With a poolish, instead of getting larger voids you get lots of smaller ones. The doughs can be more tender than a biga dough, and also somewhat crispier. As far as I am concerned the giant air holes are nice for instagram, but when im actually eating the pizza I really like what the poolish does to the texture of the finished crust in my mouth. I don't know if you have ever compared the same flour in a bromated form vs the same flour without bromate, but the poolish sort of does the bromated thing as far as its effect on the texture.
Both of these are wonderful for pizza and if I don't have one of them or wild yeast I very much miss the added flavor.
