Stripe vs Adyen

Spreedly is an agnostic provider of payments infrastructure software. In this position, we often hear questions like  "How does Adyen compare with Stripe?" or ““Is Stripe or Adyen better for my business?”.

Questions like these are important for businesses looking to process online payments. This post is not your traditional feature vs feature type of comparison. As two of the most well-known payment processing providers, both Stripe and Adyen offer powerful capabilities for accepting and optimizing payments. Each provider offers its own set of advantages and features that facilitate global payments and comprehensive compliance.

However, Stripe and Adyen remain distinct from each other, particularly in terms of the types of clients they hope to attract. This makes it crucial for merchants, merchant aggregators, and other businesses to consider the various advantages, philosophies, and features of either company.

The goal here is to provide our insights into how Stripe and Adyen philosophically approach selling and supporting their respective payment offerings. This will be helpful for businesses that are starting to scale and searching for who their partner should be in payments and  businesses looking to avoid vendor lock in and test both of these providers to discover which is the best fits their needs.

Overview: Who are Stripe and Adyen?

Though the terms “payment service provider” and “payment processor” may apply to both Stripe and Adyen, these terms can oversimplify what each of these companies actually offer. 

To better define Stripe and Adyen, let’s look more closely at how each company describes itself:

Stripe claims to offer “financial infrastructure for the internet,” and defines its primary payment solution as a “fully integrated suite of financial and payments products”.

Meanwhile, Adyen states that its solutions “provide leading businesses around the world with end-to-end payment capabilities, data enhancements, and financial products in a single solution”.

As a whole, Stripe and Adyen share many similarities in their offerings. The key distinction between the two comes down to the clients each hopes to attract — while Stripe tends to target businesses of all sizes with an emphasis on small businesses, Adyen prioritizes larger businesses that have a more complex scope of payment needs.   

Comparing Stripe & Adyen’s Company Philosophies and Sales Approaches

While Stripe and Adyen offer similar capabilities and features in their payment solutions, clear differences can be seen in each company’s respective philosophy and sales approach.

In Stripe’s business model, a massive emphasis on simplifying global payments is seen. 

Stripe focuses on offering a broad suite of services to wrap around the core payment experience. Additionally, Stripe positions itself as the “backbone for global commerce” and places emphasis on building faster, adaptable, and automated payment workflows. Stripe also offers low-to-no-code solutions to simplify implementations. 

Comparatively, Adyen’s business model is laser-focused on payment processing and doing everything possible to improve payment processing. Adyen aims to provide an end-to-end financial technology platform that offers all the payment capabilities needed in a single solution. 

As for the sales approach of each company, Stripe prioritizes the simplification of payments for businesses of all sizes while Adyen prioritizes helping larger businesses achieve ambitious goals. 

It should be noted that Stripe is still universally praised for its openness and transparency. Stripe is unique in being extremely confident in what they're building and focuses on selling the customer something truly useful. We at Spreedly have seen that attitude firsthand on more than one occasion and it's a very impressive part of their culture and one where they are well ahead of any competitor.

Stripe vs. Adyen: A Side-by-Side Comparison

Over recent years, both Stripe and Adyen have worked diligently to expand their offerings and create more comprehensive solutions that go beyond payments alone. 

Let’s take a look at how Stripe and Adyen measure up in terms of their payment offerings:

Stripe’s Complete Payments Platform

• Payments Methods & Acceptance: Stripe offers a broad range of payment methods, with more than 50 payment methods for customers to choose from. These payment methods include cards, wallets, bank debits, bank transfers, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), and cash-based vouchers. Stripe also offers many capabilities for optimizing customer interfaces, such as hosted payment pages, embeddable UI toolkits, API-only interfaces, in-person payments, payment links, invoicing, mobile payments, and third-party integrations. 
• Platform Capabilities & Integrations: Stripe’s platform customization capabilities are generally considered to be much broader than Adyen’s, though both do allow customization to an extent. In addition to payment acceptance capabilities, Stripe’s platform features also include capabilities for payment processing, settlements, reconciliations, and management. Stripe enables users to leverage hundreds of different third-party integrations, including pre-built integrations for accounting, analytics, automation, mobile payments, notifications, shipping, and tax calculations. 
• Geographic Advantages: With headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, Stripe is well-positioned for customers in both North America and Europe. The Stripe team speaks more than 30 languages to connect with customers around the globe and supports adding multiple bank accounts for different currencies in select countries. Since its founding, Stripe has worked to increase its acceptance of international, local, and alternative payment methods to enable simplified cross-border money movements and currency conversions for customers. 
• Pricing & Fees: Stripe offers two main pricing models — standard pricing and custom pricing. Standard pricing provides access to the complete payments platform and follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The standard US pricing for card payments is 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge, while pricing for other payment methods and features can vary. Custom pricing is highly varied and is designed to suit businesses with large payment volumes or unique business models. 

Adyen’s Cross-Channel Payments Platform

• Payment Methods & Acceptance: Adyen’s platform enables customers to leverage more than 100 payment methods through a single payment solution, including both online and in-person payments. For online payments, Adyen offers capabilities for web, in-app, recurring, and pay-by-link payments. For in-person payments, Adyen allows users to connect their point-of-sale (POS) systems to a single platform, consolidating all payment data. 
• Platform Capabilities & Integrations: The Adyen platform is heavily focused on cross-channel functionality and unified commerce. Through an omnichannel approach, Adyen enables users to connect both online and in-person payments into a single system, providing greater flexibility and connectivity for users. While Adyen offers plenty of in-house capabilities for processing, settling, and managing payments — as well as tools for fraud prevention, risk management, revenue optimization, and other key processes — it is not as customizable as Stripe. 
• Geographic Advantages: Headquartered in Amsterdam, Adyen has a vast global reach with regional headquarters in San Francisco, Singapore, and São Paulo. Adyen offers both cross-border payment processing and local acquiring, making it much easier for businesses to expand into new countries and regions. Full-stack Adyen Acquiring is currently available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. For countries where full-stack Adyen Acquiring is not available, Adyen offers e-commerce payment processing solutions. 
• Pricing & Fees: Adyen’s listed pricing model is based on a fixed processing fee of €0.11 plus a fee determined by the payment method used. These fees follow a pay-per-transaction model, with no setup or monthly fees. Additionally, Adyen offers flexible payout options, allowing customers to choose when and in which currency to settle a transaction. Other Adyen products besides the payment solution (such as risk management, authentication, and issuing) are priced separately.

The Developer’s Perspective on Stripe vs. Adyen

For businesses that want a highly-customizable payment solution, Stripe is the perfect option.

Developers have expressed their love for Stripe over other offerings for many years thanks to Stripe’s strong developer mindshare. Stripe’s easy-to-use interfaces and highly approachable implementation and integration capabilities make it a great option for businesses seeking a custom-built payment solution. 

Overall, Stripe provides developers with the freedom and flexibility to create a custom checkout process built for each specific business’s needs, as well as simple integrations with many advanced API tools. 

On the other hand, Adyen, while not quite as customizable, is focused instead on providing large online and in-person businesses with the technologies necessary to establish an omnichannel payment system. 

While Adyen still allows for some integrations and customization, the emphasis of Adyen’s platform is placed much more heavily on providing a single, end-to-end solution.

How Spreedly’s A/B Testing Helps You Choose Between Stripe & Adyen

To make your choice between Stripe and Adyen, the key is to test out both.

Stripe and Adyen each come with unique advantages that are best suited for a variety of different business use cases. In general, Stripe is considered the better option for customization and startups, while Adyen is regarded as the better solution for large businesses that need a more unified payment experience.

However, the only true way to determine which is best for your business is through A/B testing. 

At Spreedly, our payment orchestration platform is designed to enable customers to mix and match different payment services to find the best combination for their specific use case. 

By leveraging Spreedly’s payment orchestration within your payment stack, you can connect to a global ecosystem of payment service providers, payment gateways, local and alternative payment methods, fraud solutions, and more. Plus, Spreedly enables  A/B testing of various integrations, including both Stripe and Adyen, to help you decide which solutions your business can benefit from the most. 

Reach out to the Spreedly team today to learn more about our Stripe and Adyen integration capabilities.

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