No serious commercial grower will use seeds as they would quickly find themselves out of business. On the other hand, if you just like to watch plants grow and you enjoy killing plants that you’ve spent time and money growing because they’re male, hermaphrodite, or they express poorly, great, grow from seed.
If you’re growing cannabis from seeds, you’re only doing it for fun, not because you’re intending to produce buds more cheaply than buying it from someone. With seeds you will have plants exhibiting many different characteristics, while all being from the same breeding. Think of it like a couple of humans who have twelve children. Of those twelve kids - all raised in the same environment by the two successful parents - you’ll have 12 distinct personalities. One kid will be a doctor, another a lawyer, still another an ameteur boxer, while another will die in a drunk driving accident, another will be divorced six times with four kids not in her custody, etc.
In agriculture this is referred to as a specific plant’s phenotype. If you are at all serious about growing cannabis you should grow strain that has been carefully phenotype selected for good characteristics, such as: resistance to pests, excellent yield, high THC content and most importantly a terpene profile that is appealing to that individual.
None of these characteristics is identical amongst perhaps twenty cannabis plants raised from seeds procured from the same breeding. Acquiring clones from a reliable grower is a simpler method for a beginner - it’s rather easy to acquire a well bred and selected plant - and you can clone this plant over and over and have the exact same characteristics to repeat while you’re learning to perfect your growing style.
Additionally, growing cannabis from seeds means that half of your seeds are going to be male - and half are female. Unless you have control of your lighting cycle you’re not going to be able to see which are which and you’re going to work twice as hard to raise these plants because eventually you’re going to see which are male and which are female (after months.) When you cull the males to ensure that they do not pollinate your females so you get the highest, seedless yield possible it will be with a sense of regret as you spent a lot of time and effort taking care of ALL your plants - and half that effort is for naught.
You could purchase feminized seeds where 98 of 100 seeds are female - but then you’re looking at the same issue with phenotyping again. Additionally, 1 or 2 out of every hundred seeds will turn out male or even worse, hermaphrodite - and express bud and pollen sacks which can create catastrophic results by seeding your entire garden. So is that worth it? I have lain awake many, many nights after finding one single hermaphrodite in a garden with over six thousand plants. Why was I laying awake? Because that garden was planted entirely from seed.
The seed sales guys will poo poo on my answer. Let them. They use un-natural methods to propagate female “only” seeds. They have an enormous profit margin, they essentially breed a pair of plants together and can easily come up with two or three thousand seeds which they sell for $2 bucks or more each. Its nonsense to purchase seeds. You may hear seed vendors say something stupid like “you won’t get problems if you buy your seeds from a reputable breeder” while none of them knows what reputable means. Still, others will blame me for growing technique or whatever else. Truth be told, none of the seed vendors has more than a small little basement where totally unnatural events take place to create their feminized seeds - using caustic poison sprayed on the mother plant.
Without phenotype control, only one in ten of the plants from seed produced cannabis with bag appeal.