So I've recently had several issues with poloniex and decided to move over to Bittrex after reading numerous positive reviews, now I started trading crypto currencies a couple months ago, not had any trading experience before that other than my transferable skills I've learnt in my career as a data analyst, I found it hard to work out how to make full use of either exchange, using Bittrex for just over a week I decided to move most of my portfolio back over to the terrible POLONIEX, and here's why.
POLONIEX HOME
Immediately when loggin into your Poloniex account you presented with (1) a nice scroll down view of all coins available making it extremly easy to sort by price, volume, name and change over a 24 hour period, you also have the ability to mark the coins you are tracking with a star so you can sort by only your tracked coins,
The second useful ability with Poloniex is the zoom function (2) , being able to quickly switch from a period of 5 hours to 1month or even All time, Candlesticks can then be set to presets of 5m,15m,30m,2hr,4hr and 1 day, this is very useful when trying to determine trends quickly and easy to use, its important to note that you would generally be switching these options while monitoring your tracked coins on the right.
Scrolling down on the page gives u a neat view on market depth which shows you the accumulated values of buy and sell orders at the pricing ranges of the selected coin and more importantly (3) a very quick and easy view of current market trades vs your trades on the selected coin.
The real winner feature for me here is the night mode, as you can see my POLONIEX view is black, this is becuase I spend hours staring at various trends and it's mostly in the evening when I've come back from work, so this feature has really helped my eye strain and it's definitely an important feature to have on an exchange.
BITTREX HOME
Once you've logged into Bittrex you'll see a highlights section (1) at the top of the home page, this section will highlight the most interesting activity on the market according to bittrex, it's useful to know but I dont tend to use it very often, I guess it's just because I have my own style of analysis and most of the coins in the highlights aren't any I feel particularly strongly about,
just underneath the highlights you'll see a list of coins on Bittrex exchange relative to the Bitcoin markets scrolling down you'll see lists for both UTH and USDT markets, unfortunately to switch to chart view you opening up a new page, but for this comparison I'll consider the charts part of the home page as it's still not too bad to switch between coins as long as you select the "Markets" drop down at the top of the page and know the name to search for to view the coin in chart view.
In Chart view you have the time frame drop down (2), and the chart (3), its important to note that bittrex provides the feature to use the scroll mouse to zoom in and out of different time frames in the chart, but the zoom selection is somewhat limited as you cant really change the candlestick duration, without adjusting the time frame.
As you can see my bittrex page is white, after nearly a week using this I noticed the eye strain and I found that I wouldn't spend as much time on trading needing to take several breaks per night from the screen, this can be seen as a positive or negative point really, depends how you look at it. I personally see it as a negative as I'd much rather take a break when I need to and not when I have to.
POLONIEX WALLET
This might be seen as pedantic but logging into POLONIEX and checking my wallet, it feels great having the Estimated dollar value (1) just there without having to do any external calculations, and then looking at the BTC Value (2) a nice number displaying an exact total of the BTC in your account, I'm currently trading for BTC only, so this is a very useful feature to have
the second feature of the wallet I find to be a quality of life feature is the "hide 0 balaces" each time I log into my account and open up the wallet, this feature checkbox is in the exact state I left it in, making it very easy to browse through my current investments to see the changes from last login.
BITTREX WALLET
BITTREX for some unknown reason displays your estimated wallet total at the second decimal place in BTC value (1), I just cant see why you wouldn't have a total value of all the Satoshi in your account, for small trades this can equate to quite a difference in value and using bittrex I'd have to copy paste my investment outputes into excel to work out the movements of my wallet while I was offline, as you can see above the dollar value is also missing completely from the wallet which could prove to be irritating for traders which are trading for FIAT.
The second item I'd like to highlight on the wallet is the "Hide 0 balances" feature, as of today I'd have to tick this box each and every time I log in, Bittrex has many more trade-able coins available when comparing to POLONIEX, I cant think of any reason why you'd want to see wallets for this number of coins when you have no investment nor interest in most of them, but I guess they have been focusing on more important priorities at the moment like Support (coming up next)
POLONIEX SUPPORT
So this was the reason why I left POLONIEX in the first place, I'd lost some Siacoin recently and raised several support tickets with them, I'd also tried to contact them on the trollbox (I know they are different teams) which was later disabled, I couldn't get one official response to my issue, POLO would disable and re-enable wallets without the slightest of communication, for the amount of money these guys are making, their user support system is atrocious, I've read several stories on this subject none of which were positive, I'd say if anything bad happens to your account on POLO your basically screwed so never leave too much money in your portfolio and be careful.
BITTREX SUPPORT
Bittrex on the other hand has an impressive support system, I've logged a ticket with them asking a very basic query and within 24 hours I'd had a response, I guess you could say maybe it's because it was a simple query they responded faster but unlike POLO I'd read many good reviews on the subject of Bittrex support so I do really feel safer having my investments in the Bittrex wallets compared to POLONIEX.the Bittrex exchange makes a fraction of the money the POLO exchange does but it seems that their priorities lie with keeping the service running and users happy, so Bittrex gets 5 stars in terms of user support.
Summary
I've really only highlighted the points which have stood out when using both exchanges, unfortunately I've had to move back over to untrustworthy POLONIEX, I'm just cautious of keeping a large portfolio at the moment so I'm focusing manly on what I feel to be fast trades, Bittrex appeal to me is the extensive ICO's supported on their exchange yet POLO still wins on usability.
Bittrex also has many analysis features built into their chart view, most of which I either don't understad enough to use or wouldn't bother using either way, I think if Bittrex would work out the little kinks on their user interface it's definitely an exchange I'll consider moving to permanently.
POLONIEX has much higher trade volumes so the potential on making lucrative trades will always be higher than most other exchanges, this is probably the strongest influential factor as to why I've chosen to move back to POLO, that coupled with the nightmode feature and the detailed wallet made it very difficult to work with Bittrex on a day to day basis.
I've logged a ticket with Bittrex to see if they'd be able to introduce some of these features in future developments, it would be great if more of us would contact Bittrex requesting these quality of life features as they might take the requests more seriously if they become common ones.
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