Claude on Question 27, Sep 11

Stripe — for most people asking this question.

Why Stripe wins by default:

• •Best-in-class developer experience and documentation; you can be taking payments in an afternoon
• •Self-serve onboarding, no volume minimums
• •Huge product surface beyond acquiring: Billing/subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Issuing, Terminal
• •Massive ecosystem of integrations and hiring pool of engineers who already know it

When Adyen is genuinely the better pick:

• •You're processing serious volume (roughly $50M+/year). Adyen's interchange++ pricing plus a fixed per-transaction fee gets materially cheaper than Stripe's blended rates, and that gap compounds.
• •You need true omnichannel — physical retail plus online across many countries on one platform and one reconciliation flow. This is Adyen's strongest moat.
• •International authorization rates matter a lot. Adyen's local acquiring licenses in many markets often lift approval rates a percentage point or two, which at scale dwarfs any fee difference.
• •You have an in-house payments team that can absorb a less hand-holdy integration.

The practical tiebreaker: Adyen doesn't really want you unless you're big — onboarding is sales-led, slow, and has volume expectations. If you have to ask which is better, Stripe. If you're at the scale where Adyen makes sense, you probably already have a payments lead running an RFP between Adyen, Checkout.com, and Braintree.

One note: at large scale, "either/or" stops being the right frame. Most companies over $100M in volume run two acquirers for redundancy and routing leverage — often Adyen as primary with Stripe or another as backup.