Bitstamp vs Buttercoin

Bitstamp is very economical if you live in Europe as they have free SEPA deposits.

For small transactions (< $500 USD) you're only charged 0.5%. This incrementally decreases to 0.2% for transfers over $150,000 USD.

On Bitstamp users can enter limit orders that stay open until they are either cancelled by the client or executed in the market.

Bitstamp supports US dollars, British pounds, and Swiss francs.

You can purchase physical or virtual prepaid debit cards through Bitstamp and load money into them directly from your Bitstamp account. There are currently three supported currencies: USD, EUR, and GBP. Note: this is currently unavailable to US citizens.

Multiple threads on the Bitcoin sub-reddit praise Bitstamp for fast and helpful support.

The interface and overall user experience of Bitstamp is fantastic. The design is clean, easy to use while also providing great features like the order book.

The order book is a great feature because it’s where the exchange shows all the open orders it has from its clients.
The first part of the order book is a chart that represents all the orders organized by type (bid or offer), price, and volume. This is a very efficient way of looking at the market depth and also analyzing the open interest so you can decide how to set and manage your orders.

The site is very intuitive and depositing dollars was fast and easy. The whole process from on-boarding to buying my first bitcoin with them took about 2 days. When I sold my bitcoin, the withdrawal landed in my bank account on the same day. Also, support is super helpful and very friendly.

They are fanatical about security and put a tremendous amount of effort into finding and fixing vulnerabilities before shipping new code. There's even a bug bounty program.