<p>Quantum technologies offer ways to solve certain tasks more quickly, efficiently, and with greater precision than their classical counterparts. Yet substantial challenges remain in the construction of sufficiently error-free and scalable quantum platforms needed to unlock any real benefits to society. Acknowledging that this hardware can take vastly different forms, our review here focuses on materials that bear an optically-addressable electron or nuclear spin to embody qubits. Towards helping the reader to spot trends and pick winners, we have surveyed the various families of optically addressable spin qubits and attempted to benchmark and identify the most promising ones in each. We go on to reveal further trends that demonstrate how qubit lifetimes depend on the material’s synthesis, the concentration/distribution of its embedded qubits, and the experimental conditions.</p>