In my opinion, no Saints Row game has ever been better than any GTA game, but Saints Row 1 and 2 were pretty good games. Saints Row 1 and 2 were also great because they gave people want they wanted, a light-hearted open world game on "next-gen" hardware, something that Rockstar was going to make you wait for (and then, IMO, ultimately under-deliver in many aspects with GTAIV). Volition was smart to stop trying to make Saints Row a clone of GTA because by the time GTAIV came out, you could see how much further along Rockstar was in being able to actualize a real city and put realistic characters in it, than Volition could ever come close to. Going in the arcadey, extremely over the top route was smart, though ultimate III and IV were my least favorite Saints Row games.
Saints Row 1 still has some ideas that were better implemented than things that GTA has yet to implement, largely, the garage system and having a sense of ownership of cars, with some penalty for destroying them. Oddly, GTA Online has implemented a similar system, and yet, GTA V still has a worst system of vehicle ownership than even GTAIII San Andreas. GTAIV, of course, has the worst system of vehicle ownership of any 3D GTA game.
Saints Row III and IV were trying so hard, but ultimately left me much less impressed. Plus, the humor is so temporary in those games. They try so hard to be funny and implement this zaniness, but the concept of having a gun that plays dub step and makes all of the enemies around you start dancing, is a funny concept for about 5 seconds and it's funny in the one year that game came out, but now... 3 or 4 years later, it's just not funny.
GTA has some of that, but the humor in the series is much better done and lasts much longer. The humor in Saints Row games (III and IV especially) are like the plethora of mock-comedy movies from the 90s and early 2000s like "Scary Movie" and it's sequels. Those movies just play on pop-culture and media trends from, say, 1998, and sure, it's hilarious in 1998, but if you try to watch it in 2004, none of the jokes are funny because they're all irrelevant.