When to prefer templated policy based design over non-templated inheritance based design

Question

I am trying to understand the real requirement of the usage of templates for policy based design. Going through the new templated designs in C++ I found that policy based class

Answer 1

Both are valid ways of structuring, it actually depends on the requirements. E.g.

Runtime vs compile time polymorphism.

When do you want/can/have to achieve polymorphism ?

Performance overhead of virtual calls

Templates generate code that has no indirections

The actual usage of the class.

When you have to store heterogenous collections, a base class is needed, so you have to use inheritance.

A very good book on policy-based design (a bit dated but good nevertheless) is Modern C++ Design