Definitely cheaper, and I would say more reliable. The IDE interfaces are about the same price (£2-5) for either CF or SD to IDE ones. But CF cards have remained a lot more expensive, and smaller sizes. You can get larger CF cards but they are £100+, whereas a 16GB SD card can be picked up for about £11-15 these days, so a bargain. I use a 16GB Transcend card at the moment with an A1200 and it works fine.

I would recommend backing up the memory card to your PC after you have it all setup exactly how you want on the Amiga. That way if the card goes wrong in the future you just have to copy it to a new card. Easy solution. Wish backing up other systems and HDDs was quite so easy.