The emulations of the Empirical Labs Distressor are quite good and significantly less pricey than the 1.5k piece of gear. Besides the price difference, the plug-in emulations are capable of much more than the hardware and their sound is pretty similar, so we could say they're pretty even. It's also important to mention that Empirical Labs themselves have made a relatively new distressor-style plugin which gathers all of the original features and a bunch of new features that innovate on their classic.