After lots and lots of research we just purchased and installed a Woodstock Ideal Steel Hybrid, which won a design award for affordability, efficiency, emissions, etc. in 2013. It hasn't gotten very cold here yet, so our real world experience is negligible, but we are heating our newly insulated 1800 square foot home with wood and expect this to keep us toasty.
With my research I found that people strong opinions regarding stove brands and especially catalyst vs non-catalyst, but that in general of the major brands we considered: Jotul are very well made and very simple so nothing ever breaks, Vermont Castings seem to be very problematic (lots of things go wrong and need repair), and Hearthstone seem to get good reviews but not as good as Jotul. But Hearthstone was our favorite in the stove shop we visited - they have a large stove with beautiful wooden handles (the Manchester) that would have been ours if we hadn't gone with Woodstock.
We bought our stove due to great reviews for Woodstock, but we were also lucky to be close enough to the factory in NH to pick it up ourselves - these folks don't use dealers. Our reasons for buying it in addition to the great reviews: It is massive in size so we can fit 22" logs and pack it with wood to burn for 12 hours. It has a catalytic converter so will burn extra clean even if we burn it low and slow in spring and autumn when it is above freezing - essential for right now, for example. It was very affordable compared to the other stoves we looked at - $2,200 total versus $3K and up - though I know this is a lot more than some other stoves mentioned in the thread above. I also really liked the idea of soapstone for smoothing out the heat output but my better half preferred non-soapstone for quicker warm-up - the fact that this is a steel stove with soapstone lining allowed a compromise.
I spent a lot of time at the forums at Hearth.com reading posts and reviews, etc. and recommend poking around on there. I went back and forth between the positives and negatives of catalytic vs non-catalytic, but finally the higher efficiency at lower burn temperatures, plus the reviews of the Woodstock catalytic system, won me over.
So far we love this stove, but I'll have to add an update once it gets cold enough for more than one small fire in the morning! That has been all we've needed to keep the house comfortable so far. We can't wait for it to get cold, LOL, to really test it out.
Good luck!