Remitly vs Xoom: Which one is better?

I used Western Union the first 2 years when I had an apartment in Cavite... was o.k. until it wasn't... Then it was a Huge pain in the A$$ and I vowed to never use them again.  Never tried Moneygram... will have to check out the exchange rate on them... not sure how well it compares to Remitly?

    @dadof3at1c
I agree. MoneyGram and Western Union are far better choices for sending money to the Philippines.  MoneyGram only charges 99 cents if you load to gcash or any wallet and Western Union is only $1.99. Remitly  and Xoom are both more than double that. Also Remitly, Xoom, WorldRemit, Ria and other similar agents have weird alogrythms that flag transactions as suspicious for no reason and then take forever to refund to your debit/credit card and then refuse to tell you the reason they arbitrarily cancel.  I have sent hundreds of small sends using MoneyGram and Western Union and never had any issue.  Once in awhile for larger amounts they ask for more information but they are courteous and professional about it. Not so the others. 

What you say about suspicious actions and arbitrary cancellations takes me by surprise because I have used all of them on a regular basis for several years and never once had to explain a transaction much less been cancelled. I just use it consistently in my regular pattern, I generally transfer mostly pension and SSA income and have no reason to changey patterns significantly. Isuppose if I kept transferring 5-10K to the Philippines 4 times per month, that might get their attention. I never really transfer even 1K because my household bills are much smaller than that. Most of what we spend is in cash and for that we use debit cards... Also, I never knew anyone personally who ever had a suspicious transaction problem so if you do have one, stop making so many suspicious transactions. If you say that this your normal legal transfer pattern then you can always drop the one giving you a problem and go somewhere else. I will not argue about your cost information, it's just that in my case it is just a few dollars difference every month so I will not bother comparing. Will I go out of the way to save 2 cents per gallon had in the US?...nope, don't care. Same with penny pinching on money transfers. Also you give differences in service charges but you say nothing about exchange rates which can wash out savings in service charges.

    @Wellsfry
I too use Remitly now. But something I've thought about numerous times. We keep wanting to say you're only allowed $10,000 usd. But that's not entirely true. We are supposed to DECLARE more than $10,000 usd. Doesn't mean you can't bring it. Professional poker players may have upwards of $1m usd to play with for example. Or maybe we have a house deal for $40k usd. I haven't tried it. But I suspect you can bring more, but when asked about it on declaration papers, you probably better have a good reason. I too arrived with $10k usd. Knowing the "limit", I went to the bank before my flight. And then demanded all new bills, no tears, no ink spots, etc. Still had a few they wouldn't accept at Prince Hypermart. But the money changer will.
 

We have made several bank to bank transfers for cars and a house. Transfers were well over 10k. This is not illegal! Bank said that they had to send a form to some govt organization but it shouldn't be a problem. I agreed, transfer in the full amounts greater than 10k. Everything was fine and we never heard from the government. Also, your 10k equaled the limit so you had to declare. Also, in this day and age most travelers here do not bring cash as we did in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's. Bring an ATM card and don't worry about crisp clean bills. I remember SM Dept store made us write down the serial number of each bill. In many cases with cash you get screwed on exchange rate. You waste a lot time converting your US dollars to pesos. Also bring a credit card for shopping in the malls and hotel bills; you probably will never get a better exchange rate.

.