I always disliked paypal. Mostly for the fact that it is such a big entity and has pretty much a monopoly on what it does.
But after a long search for alternatives I discovered that at the moment they do what they do better than all competitors by a lot.

Sure their Docs are a pain at first and their RESTfull api is badly documented and not in synch resulting in large losses of time which forces developers to use the classic api which is also badly documented.. but when you understand how to use adaptive payments.. so much POWA!!

The closest rival: stripe

Why it sucks? It only allows transfers to bank accounts in the US. (at least they accept them from other countries :p )

So vendors without US bank accounts would require manual labor and dealing with a lot of bureaucracy.

Other rivals that also look very good: balanced, wepay, Sage, Brain Tree and dwolla.

But their suckiness can be resumed in this email response I got from support@balancedpayments.com:

Unfortunately at the moment we don't have support for payments to/from non-U.S. bank accounts in our immediate roadmap, so it doesn't sound like we’re a very good fit for you.

(dwolla I didn't like because they have very bad reputation on this reddit thread)

The big advantage of this services is the easy to use APIs. Which paypal could and should work on! Come on paypal!

As for costs it’s pretty much the same (paypal is cheaper for sending money to many accounts since they don't charge extra for each account), yes they are super high.. maybe with the rise of internet currencies this will get better, since the asshole banks will have less power ☺