What the four techniques are, what each one suits - and, counted from 121 contractor websites, which ones the companies in your city actually install.
Four techniques, and the honest position is that no one of them is best. What matters is whether the method suits your soil - and whether the contractor proposing it offers any of the others.
Cylindrical concrete segments hydraulically pressed into the ground one on top of another, using the weight of the house itself as the reaction force. The oldest and cheapest of the four, and still the most common repair in parts of Texas.
Suits deep, uniform clay where there is no shallow rock to hit. Struggles where segments can wander off vertical under load, or where the soil is too soft to develop skin friction. Because the house provides the pressing force, a light structure limits how deep the pier can go.
Steel tube sections driven hydraulically to refusal - bedrock or a dense load-bearing stratum - then the house is lifted off them. More expensive per pier than pressed concrete, and the dominant method in most of the cities we cover.
Suits ground with something firm to push against at a reachable depth. Struggles where refusal is very deep, because cost scales with depth, or where there is no clear refusal layer at all.
A hand-dug or machine-drilled shaft, belled out at the base to a wider footing, then poured in place. Slow, disruptive, and the most labor-intensive option - but the bell gives it a genuinely large bearing area.
Suits deep expansive clay where spreading the load matters more than reaching rock. Struggles anywhere shallow rock makes the depth unachievable, which is why it barely appears in some cities. It is also largely a Texas term; national cost publishers do not cover it at all.
Steel shafts with helical plates screwed into the ground like a giant auger. Installation torque is measured, which gives a real-time reading of capacity - the only one of the four that tells you what it is achieving as it goes in.
Suits lighter structures and additions where there is not enough building weight to press a pier, and situations where verified capacity matters. Struggles on price - usually the most expensive per pier - and in ground with obstructions that stop the helix turning.
Put those four charts together and a pattern falls out that has nothing to do with contractor preference:
52% of Houston companies naming a method offer pressed concrete against 33% offering steel. In Dallas–Fort Worth steel runs to 91%. Gulf Coast gumbo is deep and soft with no reliable shallow refusal layer; Blackland clay in DFW sits over something a driven pier can find. The contractors have adapted to the ground.
San Antonio tells the same story from the other end. West of the Balcones Escarpment the limestone is close to the surface, so steel reaches rock quickly - 85% of companies there offer it - while bell-bottom piers, which need depth to be worth digging, appear on just 5%, the lowest share of any city here.
You are not trying to become an expert on pier design. You are trying to tell the difference between a contractor who chose a method for your house and one who owns a particular machine.
Filter any city directory to just the companies that name a pier method - then compare which ones they name.