Yes, Litecoin is better than Bitcoin in terms of technology, but Bitcoin is better in terms of economics.
Below is a detailed comparision between the two with information from Litecoin Foundation, my 8 years of experience using Litecoin, and information from trusted sources on the internet.
Please note that this question has been answered from multiple perspectives which includes technical, financial, and end user experience related aspects.
Things in Which Litecoin is Better
Litecoin is technically superior to Bitcoin which was the main driver for creating the former.
Despite both Bitcoin and Litecoin being based on a similar Proof of Work model, Litecoin has several advantages over Bitcoin.
1. Transaction Speeds
Litecoin generates a block of transactions every 2 minutes and 30 seconds which is 4x faster than Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. As a result, Litecoin is able to process 50 to 54 transactions per second as compared to Bitcoin’s 7 to 10 transactions per second.
2. Network Fees
Although transactions fees vary widely in all standard blockchain networks, yet, Bitcoin is far more costlier at rougly $0.7 per transaction, whereas it costs around $0.002 to $0.04 per transaction on Litecoin.
The reason why Litecoin is cheaper is that it is designed in such a way that there is plenty of empty space per block which results in lower network congestion and therefore costs lesser to transact.
Please note that fee data may vary and users are requested to check block explorers for latest transaction costs.
Things in Which Bitcoin is Better
Bitcoin is better than Litecoin in mostly economic aspects.
1. Security
Bitcoin has more than 25,000 nodes (miners) working for it at any given time, with numbers reaching as high as 50,000 in multiple instances. Litecoin has much lesser number of nodes at around 800 to 900.
Higher number of nodes make the blockchain availabilty better. Further, more nodes mean there is a far lesser chance of any security incident as it becomes almost impossible to escape from them undetected.
2. Liquidity
Bitcoin has a market cap of around $1.63 trillion at press time whereas Litecoin has $4.5 billion. Higher market cap is a result of greater demand which results in more trading activity. It means that if you are selling or buying Bitcoin at anytime, you are likely to receive the same price as displayed on the screen with little to no slippage.
Slippage is the difference between the amount shown on the exchange screen and the actual amount in which the trade (buying or selling) has been executed. It is lower for high liquidity cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Do you know? Even stablecoins suffer from slippage despite being fixed in value. The slippages are so low (less than $0.001) that most people do not even notice.
3. Availability
Bitcoin has the widest availabity across all crypto exchanges in the world. However, Litecoin might not be available in smaller exchanges, mostly because they are less traded and hence generate lower fees for the exchange.
Even in Peer to Peer trading, Bitcoin has a very high availability. However, in my personal experience, they charge a very premium rate for selling Bitcoin, which is unwarranted and can be avoided by simply using an exchange.
4. Wider Acceptance
Bitcoin has a much wider acceptance in both corporate, institutional and retail markets. Litecoin suffers because of its altcoin tag despite having almost similar technology, if not better.
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