My personal experience is exactly the opposite of the position taken by Ms. Waldstad. My experience is that healthy plants compete quite successfully with biofilters, in fact out-compete them hands down. There are several other experienced hobbyists who report the same finding, so this is not just a peculiarity of my moderately lighted low CO2 tanks. My guess that the plants would compete even better with more light and CO2 available to them.
But re biowheels as biofilters, they are perfectly good and useful devices, a specialized W/D which separates the biofiltration from the mechanical filtration - a division I strongly support personally. I don't use biowheels myself because they make more noise than I like, and excessively agitate the surface (part of their function) which blows off my low CO2.