I like the spanner nut and wire tie-off on the K&N HP Series.
As I was a distributor of Pennzoil I had access to the full Pennzoil range along with Purolator (which Pennzoil owned back then).
Since then company has been sold to Shell and I believe Purolator sold on again. Pennzoil (Shell) stopped sales in Australia, so I needed an alternative.

Seems most filters in the States are from 1 of 4 manufacturers with Champion Labs makers of a lot of well know brands.
It should also be mentioned that OEM filters and thus all filters are designed, made and tested for a certain weight of oil. Moving away from the recommended manufacturers oil weight can make a difference with flow and filtering.

Then you have mineral vs synthetic oil. So it's not all black and white.

That said, all major brands are likely to do the job they were intended to do.