I especially liked the price of the Sam's stuff. My big mistake when we started homeschooling was overbuying, especially for the first couple of years. We wasted a lot of money that way.
We used Saxon Math starting at Math 54 and going all the way through Calculus. That's why we chose it, because by not skipping around to different curriculum, we would be pretty sure the kids didn't miss anything.
We used Rod & Staff, the Mennonite publishing company, for phonics and English. By 7th grade the English is pretty rigorous. When I checked out Abeka's high school English, it was the same level as Rod and Staff's 7th.
Rod & Staff also has a reading program I really liked for 1st through 4th grade. The readers were all based on different books of the Bible so the kids ended up with quite and extensive knowledge of the OT and some of the NT, but it was the workbooks that I really liked. The thing about R&S is that the books are pretty inexpensive and they are very basic; easy to read, clear, appropriate sized print, and not filled with lots of distracting inserts and stuff. Color pictures have their place but to much busyness on a page can be distracting. The lack of extraneous stuff, IMO, makes it easier for the kids to focus on just the reading.
After the Sam's stuff for the elementary grades, we ended up with Abeka for science, health, and social studies. I really liked their Health. For S.S. we tried Alpha Omega and my daughter really liked it. She said it presented history from a different perspective. It dealt more with the why of what happened insted of just the facts and dates. That was her opinion and she liked it better.
I just love Saxon and have used it for about 14 years. My sixteen year old finished the Saxon Calculus book a few years ago and decided to take calculus at a local college last year. He didn't hit any new material until the very end of Calculus 2. I can't tell you how excited I was to hear that. I kept asking him if was learning anything new and he'd say, "Mom! I told you--Saxon covered two semesters of college calculus! Trust me!" I will be using this for the younger kids now for sure.
I'm something of a newcomer to this topic. By Saxon Math, do you mean math from the Anglo-Saxon era, or math materials by Saxon Publishing?
(please don't laugh if I seem clueless)