Maintenance plans are too easy to schedule Backup,Restore and Index rebuild activities and its great for beginners DBAs ,who don't have too much experience with writing scripts also it saves time.
With writing scripts you have more control and can customize your maintenance activities as you wish but it requires good scripting knowledge.
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Aditya Rathour
SQL DBA
Not Everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.