Adyen vs PayPal vs Stripe

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Adyen

155
271
+ 1
49
PayPal

19.3K
14.5K
+ 1
665
Stripe

18.9K
12.2K
+ 1
1.5K

Adyen vs PayPal vs Stripe: What are the differences?

Adyen vs. PayPal and Stripe

Adyen, PayPal, and Stripe are all popular payment gateways used by businesses worldwide. While they share similarities in terms of providing online payment processing services, there are key differences that set them apart. Here are six key differences between Adyen, PayPal, and Stripe:

  1. Integration Process: Adyen offers a more streamlined integration process compared to PayPal and Stripe. Adyen provides a single, all-in-one solution that simplifies the setup and reduces the need for multiple integrations. On the other hand, PayPal and Stripe require separate integrations for different payment methods and functionalities.

  2. Global Reach: Adyen stands out for its global coverage, with the ability to process transactions in more than 150 currencies and over 200 payment methods worldwide. PayPal and Stripe also have a global presence, but Adyen's extensive coverage across countries and payment methods gives it an edge in terms of catering to diverse customer bases.

  3. Checkout Experience: Adyen offers a seamless checkout experience by embedding payment options directly on the merchant's website, ensuring a unified branding and reducing redirections. PayPal and Stripe, on the other hand, often redirect customers to their respective platforms to complete payment, which may cause potential friction in the checkout process.

  4. Risk Management: Adyen offers advanced risk management and fraud prevention tools, enabling businesses to mitigate potential risks and optimize transaction security. While PayPal and Stripe also provide basic risk management features, Adyen's robust tools and analytics offer more comprehensive protection against fraudulent activities.

  5. Pricing Structure: Adyen's pricing structure differs from PayPal and Stripe. Adyen charges a percentage fee based on the transaction value, which can lead to lower costs for high-value transactions. PayPal and Stripe, on the other hand, charge fixed fees per transaction, which may be more cost-effective for low-value transactions.

  6. Customization and Control: Adyen provides more customization options and control over the payment experience. Merchants can tailor the payment flow, design, and branding to align with their website's look and feel. PayPal and Stripe also offer some level of customization, but Adyen's flexibility allows for a more seamless integration and overall control.

In summary, Adyen differentiates itself from PayPal and Stripe through its streamlined integration process, global reach, seamless checkout experience, advanced risk management tools, unique pricing structure, and enhanced customization options. Each payment gateway has its own advantages and businesses should consider their specific requirements and priorities when choosing the right solution for their online payment needs.

Advice on Adyen, PayPal, and Stripe
Needs advice
on
AdyenAdyen
and
StripeStripe
at
()

We're looking for a payment gateway with a robust and dependable API. We will be accepting recurring payments for premium plans on our website, preferably in as many regions as possible.

While looking for Stripe alternatives, we found Adyen, which seemed like a viable option - we would love to hear your thoughts!

I appreciate your time reading this message and hope to hear back from you about your experiences with payment gateways!

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
Stripe BillingStripe Billing

I would recommend Stripe because it has a feature called Billing which is built for Premium plans. While adyen has more Payment Options, Stripe has lesser charging rates per transaction. But this also depends if your product is available worldwide or to specific nations. If you want to go worldwide, I would recommend Adyen as It is scalable. If you want to go for some specific nations Stripe will be better and easier to integrate but Stripe will also be great if you are worldwide.

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H.F. Kane
Managing Member at FCC Merchant Services · | 3 upvotes · 24.2K views
Recommends

Question for you: Where will you be running the transactions through? Will they be done in each country separately or done domestically? The reason I ask, Payfacs (i.e.: stripe, braintree, square, etc) charge two extra transactions if the processing is done domestically. The first being on an international card 1% and the second being in a currency other than your home country's currency 1%.

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Vincenzo Belpiede
CEO at StellarTalents.com · | 7 upvotes · 116.5K views
Needs advice
on
ChargebeeChargebeePaddlePaddle
and
StripeStripe

Stripe or Paddle for payment processing for SaaS?

we used Stripe + Chargebee once and will NEVER use them again (they charge too much (300usd/month while offering way fewer integrations than Stripe)

Furthermore, Chargebee doesn't support managing disputes. We still need to go to stripe for that.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts

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Replies (1)
Julien DeFrance
Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 4 upvotes · 35.2K views
Recommends
on
RecurlyRecurly

I'd recommend you check out Recurly. They are one of the leading solutions in the recurring billing space, but also support one-off orders. Recurly answers most common e-commerce use cases, will also give, out of the box, rich plan/subscription management functionalities to all the teams within your organization. They also come with great documentation, and SDKs, which from an Engineering standpoint, made it a very enjoyable pilot to work on, at the time. You'll also get great visibility/BI/analytics for free, allowing you to monitor the health of your business. Your Finance team will also get all of the data that they want. Without having you write any line of code. As you did touch upon integrations, they integrate with major payment gateways, including their own, support webhooks, integrate with Segment and therefore any tool that integrates with Segment, which makes this solution one of the most extensible one you'll find. Eg. Triggerring some Email Marketing "journey" (workflow) in AutoPilotHQ based on certain events.

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Team Showwcase
Product Team at Showwcase · | 6 upvotes · 66.7K views
Needs advice
on
PayPalPayPal
and
StripeStripe

Hi Folks,

I represent Showwcase, which is a network built for coders.

We're introducing a paywall for content creators on the platform to start accepting payments from their Followers for premium and unique content over and above the general free content. We are internally considering either Stripe or PayPal to handle this for us.

If we take the pricing out of the debate, what's the go-to choice when choosing which to integrate? Our current standpoint is that Paypal has wider consumer adoption, and since most creators are individuals, it makes sense to just use Paypal because they already have an account. However, our business uses Stripe, and so it makes it easier if both the platform (Showwcase) and creators to be on the Stripe platform. That being said, if creators don't already have an account, they will need to sign up with Stripe on the spot, which is a friction point.

I would like to hear the pros and cons in developer environments as well as any other things we might not know.

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Replies (3)
Arthur Sparks
Recommends
on
StripeStripe

PayPal is a dinosaur and a nightmare to work with, both in terms of API as well as on the business side. We support both because our A/B tests showed a material increase in conversions by offering both, but I would drop PayPal in a heartbeat if I could. Stripe is a joy to work with.

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Les Brown
Developer at Blue Sky iSolutions · | 5 upvotes · 52K views
Recommends
on
PayPalPayPal

I prefer Stripe for developers' ease of integration and PayPal for providing the simplest user experience (i.e., improved revenue.) In my experience, neither platform requires a user register to pay via credit card. However, as noted, many people have a PayPal account, which allows quick and easy payments through a "more" trusted name.

I used Stripe and Paypal and settled on Paypal for the customer. However, the PayPal web hook back end is a complete mess (at least in PHP). Unless they have improved very recently, PayPal web hook integration is poorly documented and barely supported with bits and pieces of important code on GitHub and elsewhere. I can't speak for other languages. But given the popularity of Paypal (i.e., improved revenue), I decided to keep using Paypal after I got the web hook integration worked out.

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Pamela Pierce
President at Learn About Green LLC · | 2 upvotes · 47.8K views
Recommends
on
PayPalPayPalStripeStripe

Stripe is strong because of their security. It is difficult for the programmer to install it, and in my case was impossible since my hosting provider did not have up-to-date software that it requires. I had to use another program on top of it as the shopping cart instead of using Stripe's shopping cart. But Stripe integrates with everything if you can get it to install, and is stable.

The big reason to go with PayPal is the 6 months same as cash or multiple payments over weeks for your clients. Some clients need this and you will lose them without PayPal. PayPal may change their policies, so in my opinion, PayPal is not as stable as Stripe. Some clients refuse or can't use PayPal, where Stripe is available to everyone with a credit card.

In summary, I set up both for my clients. And I used Zoho for everything else - shopping cart, accounting, CRM, banking, etc. It integrates with both Stripe and PayPal and pretty much anything else you use.

Be sure to read the Terms of both Stripe and PayPal, and I think that will help you with your decision.

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Decisions about Adyen, PayPal, and Stripe
Francesco Boffa

After the initial investigation on which platform to use to process our payments, Stripe was a total no brainer.

We are heavy users of Stripe Connect, which allows us to collect payments on behalf of our client restaurants. Connect makes it super easy to collect, payout and manage any fee structure.

At the time that the platform was written it was also the only platform that was working flawlessly with Google Pay and Apple Pay on the Web.

Today we also give out to our clients Terminals from Stripe, allowing us to process all payments under a single unified interface.

We are looking forward to further integrations, like with AliPay and other local payment methods.

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James Bender
Lead Application Architect at TekPartners · | 11 upvotes · 61.5K views

I used (tried to use) PayPal on one project and it was a total nightmare. At the time there was no cohesive "one" web-based product, you had to choose between three and the lines between them were very muddled. We reached out to developer support several times and they were no help at all. The documentation was old (incorrect) and confusing. Granted this was several years ago, but the pain remains. Given a choice of using PayPal and sticking hot needles in my eyes, I would first ask "How big and hot are these needles we're talking about?" Stripe is SO much easier!

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Kilian Stallinger
Backend-Engineer at Findustrial · | 4 upvotes · 71.2K views

Stripe is very well known for its developer experience and great documentation. We considered Recurly and other tools because of the easy tax-automations and subscription handling.

But lately Stripe introduces its own tax-handling feature, and it was just a perfect match for our usecase. Also we are migrating some of our billing to a Pay-per-Use system, wich Stripe supports very well.

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Lucas Litton
Founder & CEO at Macombey · | 4 upvotes · 285K views

We use GoCardless to simplify the way clients and partners pay for our services. What intrigued us is the quick and easy ACH feature that gives our clients the option to log in with their bank account and shoot the funds directly to our account. The fee, compared to Stripe is less. Stripe and PayPal charge 2.9% + 30c and Stripe also forces the client to enter in all of their payment details manually and then if the payment doesn't work, the client has to try all over again. GoCardless charges 1% + 25c which is much more reasonable dealing with the large projects that we are currently working on.

We integrate GoCardless with Xero to easily send out quick invoices, receive the funds and track all revenue in one place.

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With COVID-19 looming over us, businesses are, more than ever, looking for ways to set up online payments.

And having recently gone through implementing both Stripe and GoCardless to get monthly subscriptions set up and automated on my company website, I felt there was no better time to write this blog post!

If you're currently looking at working with a Payment Gateway provider API, or you're currently working with one but are not a fan, are looking to automate things a bit more, or are just generally thinking about changing, then you should have a read of my latest blog post where I compare Stripe and GoCardless.

I compare APIs in depth, specifically the subscription checkout flow that both offer (they're very similar, with some BIG differences).

There are plenty of code examples on how to set it up in a Node.js environment and right at the end, I rate each API based on the following factors:

  • API ease of use
  • API documentation
  • Payment pages
  • Costs / fees
  • Security
  • Developer appeal
  • Customer experience
  • Free Trial

So feel free to check it out, and I hope you like it. Please leave any feedback as it is very helpful. Thanks!

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Stripe was made with developers in mind first so the extensibility of it is great! This makes it very easy for us to integrate and automate as much as we need with its APIs and SDK. It allows a lot of customization of exactly what we need to build our applications. They also manage all of our customers from a tax and accounting perspective which makes it easy from a business standpoint.

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Pros of Adyen
Pros of PayPal
Pros of Stripe
  • 10
    Great customer support
  • 9
    Truly international solution
  • 8
    Great documentation
  • 6
    Well-designed API
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 4
    Omni-channel solution
  • 4
    Secure
  • 3
    PCI Compliance
  • 196
    Most known service
  • 135
    Consumers know it
  • 113
    It's available for many countries
  • 70
    Easy
  • 54
    Best way to get paid outside US
  • 35
    Most widely used payment processor
  • 25
    Express Checkout
  • 16
    Consumers trust it
  • 15
    Flexible and secure
  • 6
    Digital Goods for Express Checkout
  • 302
    Easy setup
  • 292
    Developer friendly
  • 248
    Well-designed api
  • 191
    Great documentation
  • 169
    Clear pricing
  • 75
    Secure
  • 74
    Reliable
  • 63
    Full integration with webhooks
  • 43
    Amazing api
  • 38
    Great customer support
  • 11
    Easy
  • 6
    Credit cards never hit your server - no pci worries
  • 5
    Recurring billing
  • 4
    No merchant account/gateway required
  • 3
    BitCoin
  • 3
    Easy to integrate
  • 2
    Support for SCA (Strong Customer Authentication)
  • 2
    Fast UI
  • 2
    Great app
  • 1
    Beautiful
  • 1
    Payments without own backend (using Stripe Products)
  • 1
    Connect
  • 1
    Checkout.js
  • 1
    Great UI
  • 1
    So easy to use

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Cons of Adyen
Cons of PayPal
Cons of Stripe
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Not well written recurring payment api
    • 1
      Less countries supported
    • 1
      Harder to get started with
    • 4
      Connect
    • 2
      CANNOT withdraw USD to a Canadian Bank Account
    • 2
      Does NOT have a currency conversion option like Paypal
    • 2
      They keep 25% of the income for 60 days

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions