Adaptive or Responsive

I am planning on making a website but now I am considering using adaptive or responsive for mobile experience. personally, I never create adaptive design before. I think that will possibly different layout and content to show, on my previous experience responsive layout is "hiding" the element to not show on some device size like bootstrap using "hidden-xs" or "visible-xs", but using that way actually Web Page also need to get data from server and maybe loop or process whatever function but in the end just only for desktop and hidden for mobile. is it best practice? or any other better way or best practice to solve this?