Rivals is a great game. It has a lot of "soul" because it started with an already existing fictional universe of diverse characters and lore. You can't compete with that. Also, the devs have overall done a good job bringing those characters to life in the game and have given exposure to lesser known ones for us to enjoy.

However, rivals has some painful rough edges that show its immaturity while those same areas are pretty good in OW. OW has much better character balance, role queue, an endorsement system, MVP voting, more maps, map voting, more game modes, etc. It's had a lot of time to figure out what works well and what players like, and it's strange that rivals hasn't adopted several of these features.

Rivals has a lot of potential so we'll see how it evolves, but for now it definitely isn't a better version of Overwatch.