My phone doesn't do 5GHz, but other than that, 5GHz is significantly better until you get about 3-5 walls between you and the router.

In general, 5GHz is way better for apartments (less channel congestion, apartments are usually smaller than houses), and 2.4GHz is better for non-urban houses (better wall penetration).

For urban houses (I can see 15+ 2.4GHz networks from my living room; in a larger city it could be worse), the best bet is to have 2 or more APs and connect them with ethernet if possible, and powerline otherwise. My cable internet comes in the house in the corner of the house, and is under a different roof a-frame than the rest of the house (a previous owner built living space above the garage), so I can't run ethernet through the attic, and I use powerline adapters; there's a separate subpanel for this area too, but I still get minimum 30Mbps over the powerline, which is good enough for web/e-mail.

My next step is to see if any outlets under the main roof get good signal over the powerline, and then run ethernet throughout the attic; then I can have several routers throughout the house.

I use TP-Link APs running OpenWRT; they are cheap and OpenWRT lets you adjust the power down. If you aren't cost-constrained, I've heard almost nothing bad about Ubiquity.