When it come's to bang for the buck, you can't go wrong with Broan. There is no such thing as good fans with 4 blades,squirrel cage fans are far better.

Panasonic, hands down.

Most of the Broan fans are budget units that don't have a good reputation for reliability. They may have higher end units that work better.

I've got two of the Panasonic units installed, and they work really well. Both are heat/vent, and we used timers instead of humidity detection because it gives you the option of turning it on to vent odors (using the fan), or to warm up the room before taking a shower (using the heater). The timers we used have push-buttons to select 5-10-15-30 minutes.

Bruce

We've always used Panasonic both in new builds and remodels.

I hate noisy fans, so have always gone with the Panasonics. As to "best", I installed a remote (also Panasonic, I think) blower in our current house. There's a tiny bit of wind noise at the grill, but unless you know what to listen for you wouldn't know it was on.

I used a humidity sensing wall switch which seems to work fine (you can also just tap it to run for a set period of time). It seems to me better to keep the permanently installed fan as simple as possible and put any fancy controls in the wall switch where they are easy and relatively cheap to replace when they fail.

Panasonic. Quiet performance and reliable.

Broan's whisper quiet is noisy and vibrates after a week of use.

Here's a long-term fan of Panasonics with personal experience.

We installed Panasonics in both bathrooms. One is the large size with the heat as well as vent; the other a smaller vent-only.

They were installed in 1990. They work as well as ever, to this day. Noise level is no different now than when first installed!

I have a friend who had Broan's Whisper Quiet fan, one of the TOL models. 2 yrs later it was making noise.

Your $$$, your choice.

I'm sorry to be cynical, but the quality of build in 1990 tells us nothing about the company's quality in 2018. We have a newly installed Panasonic that hardly draws at all. Which leads to my second point: make sure your installer knows how to do it properly. I'm not sure mine did.

Yes, You'll need a fan the size of a jet engine if you're trying to exhaust through 50 ft of 3" flex pipe. Distance counts, as does each bend, as each adds resistance to the airflow. You want to keep runs as short and straight as possible, and upsize the pipe if you need to add bends. Any elbows should be of the large sweep variety (join two 45's in place of one 90) Smooth hard pipe is much better than flex pipe. There are probably calculators to tell you exactly how big the pipe needs to be, but I I had more than a couple 45 deg bends I'd upsize from 4" to 5" pipe, and if it's a long run, to 6". Avoid flexible pipe like the plague, the resistance is just too high for anything longer than a 2-3 foot run.

The panasonic fans were still great in 2017.

In 2005, when we moved into this home, we had our contractor install a top of the line Broan fan/heater/light/nightlight. We replaced the heater twice and the light once. The advantage to the noisy Broan fans is that they sell parts! When something breaks, you can get that part and replace just that module. I figured I would go with them forever, but I kept burning out the heaters. When the light died after no abuse, though, I got perturbed.

When I started planning for the remodel, I asked about the Panasonic fans at a couple of Kitchen and Bath stores. No one there had ever had a customer ask about ordering parts. "They don't break," I was told. So I looked for a fan with no heater (and decided to have a different secondary heating source, since I tended to run them too long), with a humidity sensor (since I could not remember to turn it on, having grown up in a house where we had no fans because the air leaks guaranteed no fogging!). I ended up with one by Panasonic that has the fan with both the humidity sensor and movement sensor. It is so quiet that the toilet seat drowns it out. If you stop and listen, you can barely hear it. It also has a regular room light and a night light.

For heat, I went with a cove heater (electric radiant heat, up near the ceiling, that points down into the room and heats up objects in the room) that is made in the USA, thermostatically controlled, and a permanent installment. We now keep the bathroom door closed and enter into a toasty 76 degree room that feels really nice in this cold fall weather and will be wonderful come real winter!

The reason I am so hard on heater units in vent fans is that I am now at home all day, so I do not have a regular shower time. I will turn on the heat to warm the room for a shower, then forget, or decide to do "one more thing" before going to shower. I never get there, and the heater would run for hours. Problem solved with my new cove heater and closed sliding door that I only have to open wide enough to slip though.