If forced to pick just one, the winner is **Stripe**.
Here is why Stripe is the better choice for 99% of businesses:
* **Accessibility:** You can go to Stripe's website right now, create an account, and start accepting payments in minutes. Adyen, on the other hand, is strictly for mid-market to enterprise companies; they have high minimum processing requirements and a lengthy, sales-driven onboarding process.
* **Developer Experience:** Stripe is the undisputed gold standard for APIs and documentation. Developers love it because it is incredibly easy to integrate and test.
* **The Ecosystem:** Stripe isn't just a payment gateway. Its out-of-the-box tools for subscriptions (Stripe Billing), marketplaces (Stripe Connect), and fraud prevention (Stripe Radar) are unmatched in the industry for ease of use.
**The only time Adyen is better:**
If you are a massive, multi-national enterprise (like Uber, Spotify, or McDonald's), processing tens of millions of dollars a year, and you need a heavy physical Point-of-Sale (POS) presence globally. At that massive scale, Adyen's "Interchange++" pricing model becomes cheaper than Stripe's flat-rate pricing.
But as a general, definitive answer for the modern internet economy: **Stripe.**