Recently, the native SDK emulator has progressed very strongly, both in terms of performance and functionality. For example, on a relatively weak machine with a Core i3 6100 emulation does not cause any discomfort in terms of speed of work or initial start.
If the processor supports virtualization VT-x (modern Intel), then it is better to use the Android SDK emulator. Here and any hardware configurations (you can manually create any device) with all possible Android APIs, all possible Android devices (like a clock, TV, etc.). Great possibilities of device sensor emulation (temperature, light, pressure, magnetic field, etc. with manual setting), emulation of the entire device edge: battery, external calls \ sms, internet, fingerprint scanner and so on. No alternative solution has this capability.
The only reason to use a third-party emulator today is Windows OS and the processor does not have VT-x hardware virtualization (AMD processors and old Intel), then the work of the emulator due to software emulation is unsatisfactory slow.
On the Linux OS, the SDK emulator supports a much larger number of hardware virtualisations of processors, in particular AMD processors (AMD-V technology (svm)), due to the use of the QEMU virtualizer and the KVM virtual machine ( how to configure )
Off-doc emulator