In knowledge graph representation learning, link prediction is among the most popular and influential tasks. Its surge in popularity has resulted in a panoply of orthogonal embedding-based methods projecting entities and relations into low-dimensional continuous vectors. To further enrich the research space, the community witnessed a prolific development of evaluation benchmarks with a variety of structures and domains. Therefore, researchers and practitioners face an unprecedented challenge in effectively identifying the best solution to their needs. To this end, we propose the most comprehensive and up-to-date study to systematically assess the effectiveness and efficiency of embedding models for knowledge graph completion. We compare 13 models on six datasets with different sizes, domains, and relational properties, covering translational, semantic matching, and neural network-based encoders. A fine-grained evaluation is conducted to compare each technique head-to-head in terms of standard metrics, training and evaluation times, memory consumption, carbon footprint, and space geometry. Our results demonstrate the high dependence between performance and graph types, identifying the best options for each scenario. Among all the encoding strategies, the new generation of translational models emerges as the most promising, bringing out the best and most consistent results across all the datasets and evaluation criteria.