Actually, no. For all practical intents and purposes encryption w/o authentication is as good as no encryption.
Unauthenticated encryption is 'better' than a plaintext in just one thing - it protects against passive snooping. Anyone willing to splice the connection will have full access to all your plaintext data and you won't even know about it. As such it's nothing more than an equivalent of reversible traffic obfuscation.
So if your "better" meant "obfuscated", then, yeah, it's better. But it's no more secure (in a conventional security sense) than a plaintext.
Unauthenticated encryption is 'better' than a plaintext in just one thing - it protects against passive snooping. Anyone willing to splice the connection will have full access to all your plaintext data and you won't even know about it. As such it's nothing more than an equivalent of reversible traffic obfuscation.
So if your "better" meant "obfuscated", then, yeah, it's better. But it's no more secure (in a conventional security sense) than a plaintext.