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Money aside, that's kind of a tough call. The main draw of the Joule is the form factor. It's just so dang small. I can store it anyhere. I can take it anywhere. I can cook inside basically any vessel. I do wish that it had some sort of rudimentary physical controls. I've been cooking sous vide for so long that I almost never use the visual doneness features of the app, but a lot of that is thanks to all the hard work ChefSteps did in their early years educating people about SV. Having something similar built into the Hydropro seems nice, but... I really only need a temperature display and some up and down buttons. Everything else is superfluous.
I look at the Hydropro and just wonder where I'd store it. It's not even that big, but Joule is that small. Still, of all of the more expensive SV units, the Hydropro Plus is definitely the one I'd want, especially if using it in a professional kitchen. I have always wanted to have something with a probe to do some delta cooking. And the form factor is among the best of the larger circulators. The detachable clamp is nice. The repositionable jet is nice. The probe is nice. The metal construction is nice. The display, bigish though it is, is nice. I like the looks of that unit a lot. I'd swap out my Polyscience Chef for the Hydropro Plus in a heartbeat. But if the choice was between a Hydropro Plus and three Joules, I don't see how I could justify it. And that's the real world tradeoff in dollars and cents.