This is the question we get asked more than any other, and the honest answer is that it is settled by the yard rather than by the product. Both work. Both fail. What decides it is how much sun the ground gets, what walks on it, how the water drains, and whether anyone is realistically going to maintain it in August.
Start with sun, because it is the one factor nobody can change. Fescue needs roughly four hours of direct light a day to hold density, and a great many yards in Mill Valley, Sausalito and the west side of San Francisco simply do not get it. Under a redwood canopy or between two fences on a north-facing lot, sod goes in green, thins by the second summer, and is bare in three. If a lawn has already failed twice in the same spot, the third attempt will fail too, and turf is not a compromise there — it is the correct answer.
Then look at use. A dog run, a side yard that everyone cuts through, or a patch of grass between a gate and a back door takes more traffic per square foot than any lawn can recover from. Artificial turf laid on a compacted base with pet-rated drainage handles it and still looks the same in five years. Conversely, an open sunny back yard where children lie on the grass in July is a real-lawn yard: synthetic surfaces sit meaningfully hotter than grass in direct sun, and that is the one drawback nobody mentions in the brochure.
Water and cost run the other way from what people expect. Turf costs several times more up front and nothing afterwards. Sod is cheap to install and then costs water, mowing, feeding and reseeding for as long as you own the house. Somewhere between the fifth and the eighth year the two lines cross, and where they cross depends almost entirely on your water rate and whether you cut the grass yourself.
There is a third answer we recommend more often than either: shrink the lawn. A great many yards have grass in places nobody ever walks — a parkway strip, a shaded band along a fence, an awkward corner — and the lawn only survives because the whole yard is being watered to keep those bits alive. Take those out, plant them, drip them, and the remaining lawn gets watered properly for the first time.
Whichever way it goes, the base decides how long it lasts. Real sod fails on compacted ground with no amendment far more often than it fails from bad watering, and artificial turf ripples, flattens and pulls at the seams when it has been laid on inadequate aggregate. That work is invisible the day the job finishes and it is the entire difference two years later.
Santiago's Contractors installs both across Marin, the East Bay, San Francisco and southern Sonoma County. Free written quotes — call (415) 377-3889.