Is there a current best alternative to PayPal that you would recommend?

You have two basic options: 1) A proper merchant gateway solution 2) A third party payment provider with better terms of service.

On the first, I have generally recommended TrustCommerce both due to their emphasis on security (having reviewed their Perl and PHP API classes directly) and the richness of services they provide. They do cost more because Paypal gets a tremendous volume discount, but it's an option. For online payments also you have additional PCI-DSS worries that are burdensome for small businesses.

The second option includes solutions like Amazon Payments. I currently use Amazon Payments because I process 4-5 transactions per year. At that volume it isn't worth maintaining my own merchant account and certainly is not worth worrying about PCI compliance......

I've used Authorize.net + a merchant account at a real bank a few times. It works, every time.

BrainTree is awesome too.

If you're doing subscriptions, http://spreedly.com/ is good.

And Stripe looks cool but I've never used it. (https://stripe.com/)

Taking credit cards on your own site with a merchant account and gateway. But it'll almost definitely cost you more, you'll invest 10 times the resources into handling and stopping fraud, and some customers won't trust your site with their credit card. The reality is PayPal has a lot of benefits for both sides.

Samurai is really good http://samurai.feefighters.com priced similarly to paypal at 2.3% + 30 cents

You really need a true merchant account plus gateway.

This looks seriously promising - I love that it doesn't require user sign-up. Their site is brilliantly designed, too.