Should I Play OSRS Or RS3?

Runescape quests all have their own unique stories unlike other MMORPGs and RS3 has the best quests in any MMORPG.

Has a good amount of endgame content.

More microtransactions.

Pvp is dead

Cosmetics can get a bit ridiculous.

Due to instanced areas a lot of the game feels empty and everyone you see will be high leveled. This can off putting for new players.

OSRS:

What I like:

Active pvp community

Game feels more alive and you will see people everywhere. It also has more players than R3 and most of the time the number of players are double that of rs3. Right now, runescape website shows 91k total players of which 61k are osrs as seen in the OSRS website. This means there are only 91k - 61k = 30k players playing RS3 - less than half the number of people playing OSRS. (note: this is a copy/paste of an older comment and the numbers are from when I made the original comment but generally OSRS has a lot more active players anyway. Also I am leaving this here for future comments that will ask this same comparison question).

Simple UI that is easier to understand. RS3's interface is far too complicated and .

Levels are properly earned and skilling/grinding is a viable source of money making unlike RS3 where skilling is more or less pointless and is just there so you can get combat stats.

What I dislike:

Since it is an older version of the game (based on the 2007 version) graphics are outdated

Quests are much much better in RS3

Things like camera controls can be a bit clunky.

I would like to know why OSRS's player count is so much higher by thousands of players

Better pvp, more streamers.

Secondly, does OSRS even have a future?

Yes it has been steadily gaining players since the time it was released which was years ago.Safe place for private runescape servers This is a link to the population trends http://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/?display=avg&interval=month&total=1

Finally, RS3 seems to have so many micro transactions and that sort of worries me... If someone is willing to spend some money on the game does it put them to a huge advantage over others whom may not want to pay extra money on micro transactions?

The situation is not too bad now but yes RS3 does have more microtransactions which is a bad thing. You can play without it though.