When purchasing a water softener for your RV you have two choices.

A manual water softener that will require you to "figure out" when it needs regeneration. You will have to manually regenerate it. This is not a fun little job. It's a mess.

If you have a location to install an automatic water softener and you don't want to mess with all the manual regeneration nonsense then an automatic water softener is the way to go. The controller takes care of all the hard work. you just have to program the hardness and keep the salt tank maintained.