Based on strong gerbil feedback in these forums, I gave Macrium a try.
I cloned a 1TB HDD to a 256 GB SSD. First I used Auslogics to defrag the HDD. (The unmovable areas were the only issue - OS and programs were about 100GB).
Auslogics Defrag trial proved excellent - though I am unsure if a defrag program is really needed these days. It did the trick over a couple of reboots. Then used Win 8.1 to shrink to near 256GB partitions size - but it ended up about 270GB.
Macrium did the rest of the shrinking - the shrink to fit feature was great. Not only was the SSD a fine clone - it was extremely well defraged - well beyond what Auslogics had done.
I am happy, purchased Macrium.