Short answer: a purpose-written pillar page for topics you're actively trying to rank; the category archive only as a secondary crawl path.
A category page is an auto-generated list of posts — it has no original content, no narrative tying the topic together, and often thin or paginated. A pillar is written to be the best overview of the topic, with context, internal links chosen on purpose, and a reason to earn external links.
In practice: build a real pillar URL for each core topic and link clusters to it deliberately. Let category/tag pages exist for navigation but consider noindexing the thin ones so they don't compete with the pillar. The hub that ranks and attracts links is the one a human wrote to explain the topic — not the one your CMS generated from a tag.
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Q: Pillar page or category/tag archive as the hub for my cluster?
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