Bitcoin Cash is a Bitcoin fork that increases the block size to 8MB and accordingly adjusted the Difficulty which is headed by Roger Ver lending his shady 'credibility' to the coin.
Cardano uses Proof of Stake for mining, has a debit card for spending in the 'real world' and is coded from peer-reviewed academic research.
NEM is a Smart Asset blockchain, in competition with Ethereum, that uses smart contracts to track assets on-chain.
NEO, formerly AntShares, is known as "China Coin" or "China's Ethereum" and is much like Ethereum and NEM in that its a platform for tracking "assets" on-chain using Smart Contracts. (NEO has recently benefited from Chinese regulation)
Continued from:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@fskgoogle/1-sentence-about-each-coin-pt-1-of
PS: I realize some of these will be tokens, but thats OK.