It really is a complex question, but here is an in depth comparison that might help you.

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JAWS has great context sensitive help and built in training materials in both text and audio, plus an impressive amount of additional in depth training available online at various prices, and all settings have a blurb that usually does a decent job at explaining what each thing does. It also comes with allot of extra features, better OCR for reading inaccessible documents or programs, text analyzing tools for proof reading, significantly better support for business apps like microsoft office or turbo tax, a deal with the sighted assistants app Aira for up to half our long calls, code to turn ribbon menus into a more user friendly format automatically, much more customizable number reading, a powerful bookmarking feature for websites, a bunch of high quality voices that you can download for free, ETC.

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However, it also has allot of unintuitive or unnecessary keystrokes, some deprecated tools that are still just kinda, hanging around for no good reason or don't work well but are referenced in the documentation, and doesn't come with it's settings very well optimized by default. Since even with the blurbs and filtering ability, the settings center is still a sprawling behemoth, most users won't even know what they are missing until they get familiar with it, and therefore suffer needlessly.

Importantly, it's very expensive and needs to have additional (also expensive) paid upgrades over time if one wishes to stay current, and can only be paid for annually within the USA. Lately updates have not at all been worth the subscription costs for the majority of users either, but skipping them means you'll end up paying allot more later on when useful features actually get added and you want to upgrade, do to the very unforgiving update pricing.

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On the other hand, NVDA is completely free and mainly donation supported, and comes with some pretty great documentation built in. It's controls are generally allot easier to remember for most, and it doesn't have nearly as many extra features to get confused by, which is obviously both good and bad. It also tends to have less lag, and crashes less often for most people.

The community is able to create addons for NVDA, to extend it's functionality and help it stay relevant with useful features, some of which have even been rolled in to the main product in the past. and though they may very in quality or update support, they are almost exclusively free, and since far more people know how to code them than how to script for JAWS, it would be allot cheaper and probably faster to get one written for an inaccessible program at work.

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That said, they are also less secure which means that companies will be dubious of allowing them on their network, but that will hopefully not be a big issue for much longer as NV Access is working on it as we speak.

It also doesn't have quite as good braille support as JAWS, though it's definitely still plenty usable. And you'll need to buy extra voices unless you don't mind the ones built in to your system, since most people can't stand the default speech synthesizer. Also, it tends to read out emoji and other special symbols better, gets far more frequent updates, and the settings are allot easier to deal with for the most part.

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I would say that if you want room to grow in higher education or the workplace, get JAWS and maybe the Leasy scripts from Hartgen.org but if you just want to get up and running with a screen reader, I'd use NVDA and grab the training book on the NV Access website plus install the control usage assistant addon. Another option is narrator, which is a pretty good screen reader built right into Windows 10, and if your familiar with the Mac, than Voice Over is another very good option which is built right in and has tons of context sensitive help, the best emoji support in the business, and free high quality voices, but doesn't get updated enough and is starting to have problems on newer Mac OS versions.

It's a very personal thing. I personally find macs to be the most intuitive, particularly since the gesture pad can use the same iPhone gestures. I basically taught myself to use it since I just did not get on with Jaws at all.

I play tabletop games online multiple days a week, and I only really use maybe 10 key combinations or single keys. With Jaws, I felt like I had to learn a hundred different key combinations to be comfortable using a computer.

To me, it's more like how one visually uses a computer, while the Windows screen readers are more like trying to navigate a slimmed down version of whatever site with only the keyboard, which is fine but very much not for me.

On the other hand, The "Getting started with NVDA" book is only $30 and is arguably a very smooth introduction to using Windows and a screen reader...

JAWS has been designed to be very easy to use. Although it's very customisable, it provides a consistent and simple interface and methods for interaction. I personally consider NVDA, Narrator, VoiceOver (for macOS) and Chrome Vox much harder to use. JAWS comes with comprehensive introductory training material that was just updated to be current.

Voiceover

That's a very subjective question. I will say NVDA, because I never liked Jaws, and because there are so many options you'd likely get lost in there for days.