You should keep in mind that Tito ruled for 35 years and the situation in 1945 differed greatly from the time of his death in 1980.

Early on, Tito employed very brutal methods to consolidate his power. According to his personal biographer and friend Vladimir Dedijer, over 150,000 people were killed by Tito's forces without any trial in late 1944 and 1945. Granted, many of these collaborated with Nazis to some degree, but a significant number of people were killed for their political views, personal vendetta, or simply because they were in the wrong place at a wrong time.

From 1945 to 1948, Yugoslavia was a part of Stalin's block and the experience there was similar to other east European countries: there were some attempts to fake democratic elections - even some kind of opposition was allowed in the beginning, but pretty soon all the political parties were banned, all industry nationalized and heavy taxation on individual farmers introduced.

However, in 1948 Stalin tried to remove Tito, but Yugoslavian communists rallied around their leader and Yugoslavia was expelled from the communist block. In fact, in 1953 Yugoslavia signed the "Balkan Pact" with Greece and Turkey which were (and still are) NATO members and de-facto became a NATO member for a while although it was of course never officially acknowledged.

After the death of Stalin, Tito started his successful play of balancing between the superpowers, including starting the "non-alignment" movement.

In 1966, he ousted his hard-liner lieutenant Aleksandar Rankovic and opened his country to foreign tourists - also Yugoslavians could travel abroad and generally enjoy more freedom. However, that resulted in the rise of nationalism, especially in Croatia, and Tito, with encouragement from the army decided to introduce the hard line again, rather than letting Serbian and Croatian elites settle their differences without him.

The constitution of 1974 effectively turned Yugoslavia to confederation, where the states were connected only by Tito himself, the communist party and the army. Tito was getting old and senile at this time and Yugoslavia was ruled by the state elites. When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia looked good on the surface, but there were deep problems that were pushed under the rug during his rule: the political system was hugely inefficient, the economy was dependent on western credits and the nationalism was rising. It took eleven years for these problems to fully escalate, but when it finally happened all hell broke lose and the breakup of Yugoslavia was the bloodiest conflict in Europe after WWII.

To sum up, Tito was somewhat benevolent in comparison to other communist dictators, and definitely more popular both at home and abroad. However, while truly benevolent dictators managed to leave a lasting legacy (Ataturk in Turkey, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, etc), Tito left behind a country completely unable to transform and prosper after his death.

For further reading, I suggest Misha Glenny's "The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers" and "The Fall of Yugoslavia".

Also, please be aware that Tito and Yugoslavia are topics that still cause a lot of emotional and irrational reactions from all sides, so take any "black and white" story you hear with a grain of salt.