My neighborhood gym has a couple stair masters. I personally think they are better. You can basically workout your entire lower body and your core. You can really feel the difference. I don’t know much about the Nordic track thing, but I would take a stair master over any treadmill or elliptical. A indoor rowing machine would come in right behind a stair master. When using stair master I will sometimes wear a weighted vest as well. Usually after 20 minutes I’m worn out. Today I did 34 minutes with 25lb vest on. Heartbeat average was around 166-168 the entire time. It was a hard workout.