As Carlton says, it really depends on the colony rather than the colonial power.
This, for the most part.
There are at least two general rules of thumb regardless of who owned any given colony:
1. People in settler colonies had it worse than in non-settler colonies: they lost their land as well as their independence; they were forced, more or less coercively, to become a labor pool for the settlers; the colonial authorities instinctively sided with the settlers in any dispute; and nationalists were regarded as a much more direct threat and treated accordingly. Liberia, BTW, counts as a settler colony.
2. It really, really sucked to be you if you lived anywhere that had rubber. Rubber cultivation was very labor-intensive, it was usually parceled out to profit-driven concessionaires, and it occurred in places where it was logistically difficult for the colonial power to exercise oversight even assuming that it wanted to do so. Corporate greed combined with impunity invariably meant slave labor and incredible levels of brutality -- see, e.g., Congo Free State, French Congo, Ubangi-Shari and the Firestone concession.
When those variables are accounted for, I'd agree with the consensus that British colonialism was least damaging and provided the most opportunities for indigenous people. The French and Portuguese colonies made citizenship available to
some colonial subjects, and the elites in the French colonies could rise far, but until the 1940s in France, and until the very end in Portugal, very few people actually had citizenship rights. If you were Senegalese and lived in the
quatre communes, you could become a deputy minister in the French government; your neighbor fifty miles inland was subject to arbitrary justice and had to do forced labor, and his experience was a lot more representative than yours.
The worst colonial power, of course, was Belgium - the Belgian colonies' post-independence history is pretty conclusive proof of that.