In practice you need merchants to accept the coins for them to be very useful. So far no coin has come ahead although there has been some uptake for Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

You can also use services which convert your coin of choice to Bitcoin, for example using shapeshift or for Monero xmr.to which is excellent. You can't avoid the fees on Bitcoin if you do that though...

There are many coins which have cheap and fast confirmations, for example Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.