It all depends what you want I guess.
I have both & have experimented with various ways of working, everything from Cirklon controlling absolutely everything to just providing clock & leaving the Elektrons to their own devices.
Cirklon is a way more powerful sequencer but that’s to be expected as every penny spent is spent on sequencing duties whereas the OT covers a lot of bases.
There are guys over at the sequentix forum who have all their Elektrons mapped out on Cirklon & this affords a lot of flexibility. If you’re into patterns that evolve that have percentage based random elements, accumulate, lock to scale/mode, can be programmed in much finer detail, have forward, reverse, ping pong, alternate, brownian & random directions etc then Cirklon is a winner.
Downside is that this approach sacrifices P.locks & if you use a lot of them then it’s not ideal. Upside is that (with P3 patterns), you get 4 Aux events per Track & these are controllers with P.lock type attributes…sort of, well it depends which you choose…
Other big upsides are that Tempo is stored with the song, tracks have an adjacent ‘press one button to activate’ Fill track & there’s the gang function which is immensely useful & loads of fun in a live situation! Then there are inter track events like grab, swap & push…the list goes on.
For me Cirklon doing everything or just providing clock is the way to go. Any middle ground like mixing patterns on both (several) machines will result in frustration. The main reason being that Elektrons don’t respond immediately to program change, instead they queue the next pattern. This causes the Elektron pattern to change later than the Cirklon one which is…well…not best!!!
Another feature worth mentioning are CK patterns which are essentially ‘Trackers’. (An events list)
If you’re into composing as opposed to live interaction then these are the way to go, allowing pretty much anything you can imagine really!
Would I buy a Cirklon to accompany an OT? Hmm probably not. The inbuilt sequencer is pretty powerful & the LFOs give you a lot of mileage when it comes to modulation, random & even accumulator type things & that’s probably enough…then again it’s not the same!
I’d have a long hard think about what I’m trying to achieve really & certainly wouldn’t consider the Cirklon until I was comfortable with the OT.
Anyway hope some that helps, I’m gonna have to go & lie down now, all this typing is killing me 