What's the real difference between pipeline caching strategies in different tools?

Hi everyone! New to this forum and diving deep into CI/CD. I've been setting up pipelines for our email marketing automation and seeing some crazy slow build times.

I get the basic idea of caching dependencies, but when I look at tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI, their caching implementations seem… different? Like, the config syntax and what they actually cache by default varies a lot.

For those who've switched tools, what's the real, practical difference you saw? Is one tool's caching inherently faster or more reliable for, say, a Node.js project? I'm trying to cut our build times without overcomplicating things. Any benchmarks or gotchas would be amazing to know! 😅