The vendor add-ons contain drivers that may be required for the hardware, but not included in the default VMware image.
So yes, use the vendor customized version.
If you ave vCenter Server in place, and assuming that you have more than a single host, you can update/upgrade ESXi using the single image based update method per cluster, which allows you to select a VMware version, a vendor add-on, as well as individual components, which are then combined, and installed on the ESXi hosts.
André