Popular classification algorithms over time
Gradient Boosting performs well for problems that have a medium amount of tabular data. Many problems on Kaggle are in that style.

Currently, Deep Learning holds many of the state-of-the-art benchmarks. Deep Learning generally performs better as the amount of data grows. Deep Learning performs better on other types of data (images and text). 

No single machine learning algorithm is best in all cases, often called the "no free lunch theorem".