Crypto exchanges are largely divided into two categories: Centralised exchanges(CEX) and Decentralised exchanges (DEX).

Many people swear by Decentralised exchanges, and would never use a centralised one unless they were forced. And some would never go the decentralised way, although that's really "the way of crypto".

So which is better? Well, I've used Binance and Binance DEX in this comparison, as well as Loopring DEX and Uniswap (which really isn't an exchange but I'll count it). I also used IDEX. Here are my thoughts.

Centralised exchanges have some terrific advantages over their decentralised counterparts. Here are just a few of the ones I found.

• Fees: Good God, the fees on IDEX! On Binance, the only fees I have to pay are the trading fees, which is only 0.075% of my position, paid in BNB. So I basically don't pay fees at all because I can convert the small balances i have to BNB. On IDEX however, I deposited my ETH into my "account" (that's already one fee), but found that I had to deposit it into my trading account. So I (surprisingly) paid a fee for that, and when I got to the trading area, I wanted to buy some DEC, but found that I had to pay a really huge fee (about 0.15ETH) to have my order filled because of the size. At that point, I had had enough, and just shifted my funds over to MXC and bought my DEC there. The problem is that on a DEX like that, your transactions are miner directly on the blockchain, whereas on a CEX, you're buying from someone else, and the trading engine does the matching, so there are no hilarious fees involved. (BTW, I'm never using IDEX again lol)
• Design: have you seen IDEX? Puke city over there. The design is horrible to say the least. Ditto for LRC DEX. They both look like utter rubbish. Uniswap is the most beautiful of DEXs, but since there's really no "exchange", I can't include it here. However, CEXs have the funds to create lovely looking sites, and they really deliver. CEXs are therefore more appealing to newbies.
• Options: With most DEXs, they are built upon a specific blockchain, like the ETH chain or Binance chain. This makes them "specialised" in some way. For example, you can't buy BTC on IDEX, because IDEX is on the Ethereum blockchain. However, CEXs offer a wide variety of options because they support all types of blockchains and tokens. Heck, there's an exchange I use that has over 600 cryptocurrencies up for trading. 
• Development: Because CEXs are very well funded, they have more (skilled) developers whom they can pay very well. They also keep on adding new features, upping the design and continue increasing security measures, whereas on the DEX side, there isn't a lot of development or improvement going on. IDEX has looked like that forever, and LRC exchange has a few quirks in its own design.
• Low volume on most DEXs: Exchanges like BitMex have Billions of dollars in hourly volume alone. This isn't the case with DEXs, with most of them having a mere 5000 or 10000 dollar volume on even some major coins.

Up to this point, it may seem like I've been bashing DEXs. But they do have some advantages over CEXs. Let's look at some.

• No politics or bulls**t: CEXs are owned by individuals, which brings a lot of "politics" and personal problems into the mix. Like the Justin Sun takeover of the STEEM blockchain being aided by Binance, or the recent MXC mishap with a certain DeFi coin. They mostly introduce problems to the mix because of their personal issues. None of this happens on a DEX, because no one owns the DEX.
• No stealing: There have been many instances where attackers stole from CEXs, or where the owners themselves ran off with user's money. Well, in a DEX that isn't possible, because they are built upon a blockchain, which CANNOT be hacked. Equally, they have no owners, so no one can run off with your money.

Those are my points! So which is better?

To be honest, it depends on the user. If you're a noob, I strongly recommend you stay away from DEXs. They are quirky, and not at all simple to use. And the fees are astral on most of them. I paid over $5 in fees to get my ALEPH tokens from Uniswap.(they're up over 400% from my entry by the way)

However, if you want to really "stand" for crypto, then you could go the DEX route. 

But until DEXs get much, much better than CEXs, I'll be sticking to CEXs for now.

Thanks for reading.