Which is best?

Put simply, use a VARCHAR field instead of TEXT for columns between 255 and 65k characters if possible as it will lead to potentially fewer disk reads and less writes.

VARCHAR

• Max size of 65535 characters
• Uses 2+n bytes to store the value where n is the length of the stored string.
• Stored inline within the table like other values
• Can be handled in memory
• Can be indexed

TEXT

• Max size of 65535 characters (more for mediumtext and longtext)
• Uses 2+n bytes to store the value where n is the length of the stored string.
• TEXT is stored off table with the table having a pointer to the location of the actual storage.
• Using a TEXT column in a sort or in the results will require the use of a disk-based temporary table as it can’t be handled in RAM.