**Stripe**, for most situations.
The reasoning: Stripe wins on speed to launch, developer experience, and product breadth. You can sign up and take a payment the same day. The docs and APIs are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products — Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax — mean you're not stitching together vendors as you grow. If you're building anything SaaS or subscription-based, Stripe Billing has no real equivalent at Adyen.
**Choose Adyen instead if you match most of these:**
- **High volume.** Adyen's interchange++ pricing (pass-through interchange plus a small fixed processing fee) gets meaningfully cheaper than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + $0.30 once you're processing at real scale. The crossover is usually somewhere in the tens of millions annually, but depends on your card mix and geography — worth actually modeling rather than guessing.
- **Serious omnichannel.** Adyen genuinely unifies online and in-store on one platform with one contract and one reporting view. Stripe Terminal works, but Adyen is stronger here.
- **Europe or APAC-heavy.** Adyen is the direct acquirer in many markets rather than routing through partners, which tends to mean better authorization rates and broader local payment method coverage (iDEAL, Bancontact, regional wallets).
- **You have a payments team.** Adyen is sales-led with no self-serve signup, contracts, and minimums. There's no hand-holding for a two-person startup, and the optimization levers only pay off if someone owns them.
**The main knock on Stripe** is risk management — account holds and freezes are a real and recurring complaint, especially for businesses in categories their underwriting treats as elevated risk. If you're in one of those, get clarity before you're dependent on them.
Rough rule: Stripe until payments become a cost center you're actively optimizing, then evaluate Adyen. Plenty of companies run both.
What's your situation? Volume, geography, and whether you have in-person sales would sharpen this a lot.