It depends a bit on the task and language, but my go-to is usually minishlab/potion-base-8M for every task except retrieval (classification, clustering, etc). For retrieval minishlab/potion-retrieval-32M works best. If performance is critical minishlab/potion-base-32M is best, although it's a bit bigger (~100mb).

There's definitely a quality trade-off. We have extensive benchmarks here: https://github.com/MinishLab/model2vec/blob/main/results/REA.... potion-base-32M reaches ~92% of the performance of MiniLM while being much faster (about 70x faster on CPU). It depends a bit on your constraints: if you have limited hardware and very high throughput, these models will allow you to still make decent quality embeddings, but ofcourse an attention based model will be better, but more expensive.