: Are the effects on a guitar pedal/stompbox any better than an amplifier's overdrive? I've been around guitars since I was young but I haven't really looked into them that much. I know that a Guitar Pedal can do more than

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It's probably not wildly inaccurate to say that as a basic tone, the sound of a nice valve amp on its own - with no pedals - is one that a lot of guitarists would be happy with.

If we take that as a starting point, why would a guitarist use a distortion pedal?

Someone might not be able to afford a nice valve amp, but might be able to afford a pedal that emulates the sound of one. Or they might want a pedal that emulates the sound of a different type of amp.
A valve amp often only sounds its best within a certain range of volumes. Getting one's sound from a pedal can make it easier to achieve the sound you want at different volume levels.
A digital pedal with presets enables instant recall of whole signal chains (including non-distortion effects).
getting your distortion from a pedal allows you to put effects after that sound, which can be useful with delay and reverb.
some pedals, rather than sounding nice in themselves, are designed to push a valve amp in a certain way that sounds good.
some pedals offer types of distortion that are not amp-like - e.g. fuzz pedals, bit crushers, multi-band distortion, and so on.
some guitarists don't actually use an amp at all, and are happy to plug straight into a recording rig or PA, getting all their sound from pedals.

So it's not necessarily a question of pedals sounding better than amps so much as often being more practical, or expanding the range of creative possibilities. if money's no object and you have space for a studio full of different valve amps, you might not need to reach for distortion pedals straight away. In other circumstances, they have their uses.

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Are the effects on a guitar pedal/stompbox any better than an amplifier's overdrive?

Not necessarily.

...is there any difference between the clarity in tone when using a Pedal vs. An amp's overdrive/gain?

Usually, yes, but there's no rule that one is usually more clear sounding than the other, and there's also no rule saying that more clarity is necessarily better or worse than less clarity.

Not counting different tone settings, bias settings, and tube replacements, I have at least six different possible distortion/overdrive sounds from amplifiers I own. These are all pretty high quality tones from 100% tube amps that I have carefully selected and tweaked over the last 20 - 30 years.

Again, not counting different tone settings (which actually do make a big difference), I have at least six different possible distortion/overdrive/fuzz tones from pedals that are all solid-state. Again, I've honed my collection over more than 30 years of playing and I like to think I get some pretty good sounds.

Why do I have more than 12 different "distortion" sounds? Are some of them "better" than others? To answer the second question first, no, they are all either very good or excellent sounds. The answer to the first question is they are all different sounds and they all have their times and places and combinations where they are useful.

In my last band, I had two amp distortion sounds and five solid state pedal sounds that I would bring to and use for every show - because the different songs and different guitars called for different sounds and different feels. When I recorded guitar parts for our EP (of sorts), I crafted even more tones that were not practical in a live setting to get to the exact sounds I wanted for the songs.

As with all things musical, it's a matter of taste, and it's situational, and it's personal, and expressive. What gear we use and how we use it is part of the process and it's not objective, it's subjective.

Some of the most famous "distorted" guitar sounds recorded are the result of amp overdrive, some of them are from a pedal, and many of them are a combination of both. There are times and places for almost anything, even a cheap little ProCo Rat pedal (made famous by Kurt Cobain on Nevermind).