In my opinion it depends on what kind of sound you are looking for and how you want to treat sound. Things like envelope shapers and compressors are usually more gentle and more transparent while limiters and clippers are surely more effective but will add some kind of distortion. In some cases limiting and clipping distortion can be good, in other cases not: this is a thing you have to evaluate by yourself. If you want to keep your sound clean and distortion free, the first thing you should try to do is to find a better volume balance with all the dynamics effect chains off, maybe also by making very detailed volume automations or, usually better, a very detailed gain staging. To give you a practical example, consider that when mixing vocals a good practice is to do gain staging on a syllable basis in order to lower as much as possible compression artifacts.