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Sage's symbolic manipulation in general uses a special custom version of Ginac for everything except limits, solving, integrals, and assumptions (maybe one or two other things), and uses Maxima for those things.

However, I don't think one could say that Sage is "better" than Maxima because of this; in fact, some of the more subtle things that most (current) Sage users don't need as much are much easier to use in Maxima - especially setting things like simplification flags.

It's best, perhaps, to use Sage for things that need easy integration with other types of mathematics, and Maxima (perhaps in batch mode) for things that need its capabilities. Luckily, you can pass most stuff back and forth fairly well, though some % things in Maxima don't translate too well (like %if and %union).