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PayPal vs Stripe: What are the differences?
What is PayPal? Send Money, Pay Online or Set Up a Merchant Account. PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser..
What is Stripe? Payments for developers. Stripe makes it easy for developers to accept credit cards on the web.
PayPal and Stripe can be categorized as "Payment Services" tools.
Some of the features offered by PayPal are:
- 2.9% + $0.30 or less- With our flat, transparent pricing, you’ll never be surprised by hidden or variable fees. We also offer discounted rates when you sell a lot, or when you use our card reader.
- Keeping every seller secure- If you’re sent an unauthorized payment, or a buyer claims they never received an item, our Seller Protection covers you for the full amount of the eligible payment.
- Easy for them, easy for you- With just a few clicks, you can get paid by debit card, credit card, or a PayPal transfer. All someone needs to start buying from you is your e-mail address or mobile number.
On the other hand, Stripe provides the following key features:
- Full-stack payments- You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account. Stripe.js lets you build your own payment forms while still avoiding PCI requirements.
- An API that gets out of your way- It’s so easy, we’ve embedded a bunch of examples right here. Copy some of these requests into your terminal and check out what happens. With wrappers in Ruby, PHP, Python and more, you can get started in minutes.
- Pricing like it should be- 2.9% + 30 cents per successful charge. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money.
"Most known service", "Consumers know it" and "It's available for many countries" are the key factors why developers consider PayPal; whereas "Easy setup", "Developer friendly" and "Well-designed api" are the primary reasons why Stripe is favored.
Hipmunk, Exec, and Kickstarter are some of the popular companies that use Stripe, whereas PayPal is used by Uber Technologies, ebay, and Asana. Stripe has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1601 company stacks & 508 developers stacks; compared to PayPal, which is listed in 730 company stacks and 561 developer stacks.
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
RecurlyI'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.
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.
StripePayPal 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.
PayPalI 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.